Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts

Gothic Hauntings

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Gothic Hauntings Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts Christine Berthin

© Christine Berthin 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23787–2

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berthin, Christine, 1960– Gothic hauntings : melancholy crypts and textual ghosts / Christine Berthin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–23787–2 (alk. paper) 1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English—History and criticism. 2. Horror tales, English—History and criticism. 3. Ghosts in literature. 4. Metaphor in literature. 5. Symbolism in literature. 6. Psychoanalysis in literature. 7. Psychoanalysis and literature. I. Title. PR830.T3B47 2010 823'.0872909—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2009048425

For Juliette, Milena and Richard

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1 Transgenerational Haunting: The Subject as Other The Castle of Otranto as “Nec-romance”

8

Phantomatic transmissions: Abraham and Torok and the Gothic

18

Enigmatic signifiers and Seduction (Laplanche): “Intersign” by Villiers de L’Isle Adam

23

2 Discourse and Its Other: The Figural and the Real

3

The Real in language

33

Corporeality in language

39

Onuphrius and literal language

43

Non-discursive forces at work in discourse: “The Figural” (Lyotard)

45

The “Phonotext” (Garret Stewart) and the reading body

52

Gothic as Poetics Theories of the fantastic: Rereading Todorov

58

The Gothic and the paternal narrative

62

Anachrony and analepsis

67

The question of origin

70

The Gothic as anti-discourse

73

Broken words and stranded fragments of language: The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk

75

Catachresis and death in language

76

The Bleeding Nun

78

Dechronology and family secrets

80

An uncanny reading of The Monk

81

vii

viii Contents

A Gothic reading: Abjection (Kristeva)

82

The Gothic and melancholy

87

4 The Melancholy Crypt of Frankenstein A fantasy of incorporation: The melancholic crypt

92

A narrative in excess: Victor ventriloquizes his mother’s secret

100

Clandestination and telepathy

104

5 Secretions and Secretaries: The Secret of Dracula Buzzing noises and the spells of the modern world: From “transcript” to “transcrypt”

111

“Look with thine ears” (King Lear): Dracula’s Gothic imperative

122

Secret transmissions

125

Quincey Harker

131

6 The Raising of the Dead: Art and Melancholy Photography and magic restoration: Barthes’s Camera Lucida

134

Photography and the fantasy of pure referentiality

135

The punctum

137

The-Proof-according-to-Saint-Thomas-seeking-totouch-the-resurrected-Christ

139

Art and elegy: Affect in language or “the Semiotic Agitation within the Symbolic” (Kristeva)

147

To the lighthouse of fiction

150

“So much depends, she thought, upon distance”: Lily’s hallucination

153

Notes

156

Bibliography and Works Cited

174

Index

183

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Helene Moglen and Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who have been important mentors for me at different stages of this project. I am also grateful to my friends and colleagues in the English department at Nanterre for their support and generosity. Completion of this book would have been impossible without them. Earlier and shorter versions of some parts of this book have appeared elsewhere. I wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Presse de l’Université de Pau for “Family Secrets and a Shameful Disease: ‘Aberrations of Mourning’ in Frankenstein,” in QWERTY, 3 (1993), pp. 53–61 and Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne Nouvelle for “Inherited Memory, Secret, Secretions and Secretaries in Dracula,” in Mémoires perdues, mémoires vives, eds, M. C. Lemardeley and A. Topia, 2006, pp. 31–43. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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Introduction

There is a place in men’s lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them. This world, the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert. —Leslie Fiedler1 Ghosts are no longer a question of belief. Since the Reformation, they have ceased to inhabit an improbable purgatory, a non-place between life and death or between Heaven and Hell.2 Since the advent of “the Gothic romance,” they have been relegated to what Leslie Fiedler calls the “night-side of life,” “the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them.” And since the advent of psychoanalysis, they have belonged to the class of “infantile reminiscence.” They are merely parental figures or “nocturnal visitors” who disturb our childhood sleep.3 Yet, as Buse and Stott remark, even though ghosts have been left behind by belief, “spectrality and haunting continue to enjoy a powerful currency in language and thinking.”4 While ghosts have been explained away, spectrality has become a major trope of our culture and our cultural discourses. It hovers at the crossroads between literature, psychoanalysis and critical thinking as the crux of our modernity. More than a theme, haunting is part of the processes of literature and textuality, and ghosts have become theoretical objects. The purpose of this book is to explore, through the Gothic tradition, this shift from the figure of the ghost as narrative device to spectrality as literary trope and a critical tool. 1

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Gothic Hauntings

For Jacques Rancière, literature in the modern sense of the term emerged at the hinge between the Age of Reason and the Romantic Age. “Literature,” as opposed to classical “Belles-Lettres,” comes to define the mode of self-questioning at the heart of the text and of language. Literature is the movement by which writing reflects upon its own possibility.5 It is “the uncanny site par excellence”6 because, by nature, it includes its own shadowy others. The historical shift from Belles-Lettres to literature is at the core of the Gothic conceived both as the historical genre where the “night-side of life” is given a space, and as a type of writing in which language explores its own limits, its “night-side.” We will see how it is in the nature of the Gothic to explode textual limits in order to include the hidden and the hinted at. The Gothic also questions the very possibility of representation and de-substantializes the symbolic order as inherently ghostly or haunted by its own failings. Gothic therefore will be taken here both as a noun and an adjective. The Gothic as the genre or literature of unreason7 will serve as the matrix for most of the textual analyses and its narratives will be investigated to explore haunting as a theme and a structure. But in essence, the purpose is to define what is “gothic” in the Gothic, the adjective qualifying a characteristic mode of de-stabilization of meaning, which functions at the linguistic as well as the narrative level of some texts. The adjective “gothic” will describe texts that display a fantastic impulse. “Gothic conventions,” Anne Williams reminds us, “imply a fascination with the problem of language, with possible fissures in the system of the symbolic as a whole.”8 Although this “Gothicization” of the symbolic clearly finds an echo in post-Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, the purpose of this study is not to present the Gothic “in analysis” or psychoanalysis in the Gothic. It is not to prove that the gothic anticipates Freud or that Freud’s work reads like a Gothic text, but rather to see them as working through similar issues. Michelle Massé comments on the fact that “psychoanalysis grows from the same cultural unease as the Gothic. It is itself a socio-cultural symptom, with no more explanatory force than any novel.”9 From literary theme to metalinguistic process and analytic tool, haunting is a key to understanding our culture. Like all conceptual tools, the notion of “haunting” comes with a story, a past and a genealogy. As I trace back to their various critical sources the notions of crypt, phantom and melancholy, I would like not only to unravel the theoretical ramifications of the concept of “haunting” but at the same time to claim an inheritance. Haunting is nowadays inseparably linked to the Derridean concept of “hauntology,” which, since the publication of Specters of Marx, has

Introduction

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triggered renewed interest in the field of ghosts and specters.10 Hauntology is the dark double of ontology. It deconstructs and empties out ontology, being and presence. Neither alive nor dead, the Derridean specter hovers between presence and absence, making it impossible to assign definite meanings to things. For, as Ruth Parkins-Gounelas explains, haunting and spectrality have to do with “the untimeliness/ anachrony which, to use Derrida’s words, put to rout our meaningto-say.”11 It is in the nature of ghosts to stand in defiance of the binary oppositions (life or death, inside or outside as well as present or past) that constitute our symbolic system, and as such they are intimately linked with deconstruction. Spectrality then concerns just as much the present as the past: it is “what makes the present waver.”12 In Nicholas Royle’s analysis, it is what is “never fixed, but constantly altering.” “They are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the ‘there’ as soon as we open our mind.”13 The spectral is an uncanny and “the uncanny is (the) unsettling (of itself).”14 This principle of unsettling is tied up with an experience of language caught in an endless movement of sliding and deferral in which the ultimate referent always recedes and retreats. Thus, as Julian Wolfreys makes clear, “all stories are more or less ghost stories,” “all narrative, [. . .] all structure perhaps is haunted and [. . .] haunting or spectrality constitute in part, even as they haunt, the condition of narrative or structure.”15 Clearly, Derridean hauntology echoes the disquieting and unsettling potential at the heart of Gothic structures and conventions and radicalizes it. The Gothic, with its refusal of linearity, its confusion of surface and depth and its dismantling of chronology, in a way, “has always allegorized” the uncanny structure of textuality, as Jodey Castricano remarks.16 This book proposes to explore how the Gothic is the material repository for that which language fails to touch but which haunts it like an “unsayable,” unreachable core. Far from having anticipated theoretical issues that inform our modernity only in an allegorical or intuitive fashion, the Gothic is examined here for bringing these issues to the fore openly. The Gothic is concerned with haunting not just as a theme, but also as the principle behind communication in general. The work of French psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok provides seminal insights into the study of haunting in language and also innovative tools to stalk the ghosts generated within the house of language by the play of language. Davis comments on the fact that Derridean hauntology has removed Abraham and Torok from the agenda of literary ghost studies.17 The theoretical frame of Gothic Hauntings is

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evidently and primarily influenced by Abraham and Torok’s work on the crypt and transgenerational haunting, and the book can be read as a revaluation of this other critical source of conceptualization of haunting in literary studies. Unlike Davis, who traces the origin of hauntology to “two distinct, related” sources—Derrida and Abraham—I do not see these sources as “incompatible.”18 In particular I see the influence of Abraham and Torok’s work in contemporary theory as being more extensive than Davis concedes it to be. Indeed, as Royle has noticed, “although Derrida has written a book about specters, spirits ghosts and phantoms, nowhere in Specters of Marx does he discuss the writings of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.”19 But, like Royle, I am not interested in tracking issues of debt between Abraham’s theories of the crypt and the phantom and Derrida’s specters. For sure, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word precedes in time Specters of Marx, but it is “Fors,” Derrida’s long and influential foreword to Wolf Man’s Magic Word, that played a crucial role in introducing Abraham and Torok’s work to a wider audience. “Fors” functions like a hinge between the Gothic, deconstruction and the psychoanalytic revolution of Abraham and Torok’s work. One could of course risk a cryptonymic reading of Specters of Marx and most certainly uncover a family secret of sorts in the way Derrida’s writing has incorporated Abraham’s topographic metaphors for instance and seems to have encrypted some aspects of Abraham’s theory of the crypt. Royle calls up the notion of “textual phantom” to evoke the principle of echoes between texts which “do not necessarily have the solidity or objectivity of a quotation, an intertext or explicit, acknowledged presence and which do not in fact come to rest anywhere.”20 The open-endedness of hauntology certainly makes it an important instrument to deal with the Gothic. But my book, without refusing the ghostly inheritance of Derridean hauntology, aims at reinstating the legacy of Abraham and Torok in the field of literary studies, and in particular Gothic studies, and at taking on the complex overlapping of theory their work has triggered in contemporary critical discourses, from Laplanche’s concept of “enigmatic signifiers” to Lyotard’s notions of “discourse/figure,” the Lacanian “Real” and Kristeva’s “semiotic chora.”21 For Abraham and Torok haunting is transgenerational. It takes the shape of a secret transmitted within a family or a community without being stated because it is associated with repressed guilt, shame or is the result of a trauma that has not been worked through. Because it remains unstated, the secret constitutes what Abraham calls a “phantom”: an unconscious formation which has never been conscious and is conveyed from a parent, a dead person or a lost object to the unconscious of the

Introduction

5

child, the living subject or “phantom carrier.” In this Gothic account of our everyday life, the phantom, or unconsciously inherited secret, lodged in the ego of a subject or protagonist as in a crypt, remains untold but distorts the text of the “phantom carrier’s” life with alternative and lateral meanings. Haunted by the traces of unspoken past events and dramas, the literary Gothic obsessively stages the shadows that necessarily accompany any attempt at discursive meaning. This becomes the thematic of family secrets and ghostly transmissions in Gothic narratives, as we will see in Chapters 1 and 2. On a formal level, it manifests itself by attacks on language: ellipses, semantic ambiguities, anachronisms, clichés, puns, homophonies and literalized metaphors seem to bar immediate access to the discursive level of the text, forcing us to read against the grain and between the lines for alternative meanings and stories. The notion of phantom and transgenerational haunting is intrinsically linked to the notion of crypt for Abraham and Torok. A refusal to lose a highly cathected love object might lead to his/her phantasmatic inclusion in the ego, in a psychic crypt separate from the ego and yet invisible to the outside world. The crypt is the place where the foreign object is incorporated, encysted in the ego, yet outside of the ego, concealed and yet gesturing towards the ego. Unstated secrets from the past that haunt younger generations and warp the course of their existence, live burials and ghosts that return on unfinished business are clearly major narrative and linguistic motifs of the Gothic. Gothic Hauntings analyzes them in terms of phantomatic transmissions and encryptment to show how they can be read as symptoms of a deep questioning of the notion of subject and of the symbolic order. Chapter 4 for instance, analyzes how Victor Frankenstein’s creation of the monster corresponds both to the magical encryptment of his dead mother and the encryption of her secret in him. The dead mother is thus kept artificially alive, but at the cost of Victor’s turning into a phantom-carrier and becoming “other.” Chapter 5 analyzes how illegitimacy, the secret encrypted in Dracula, chooses the bodies of the vampire’s victims as the site of its mute inscription. Chapter 6 concentrates on the mechanisms that lead to the formation of crypts in some melancholy subjects and studies how melancholy crypts aim at the destruction and deferment of the expressive power of language. The elaboration of a crypt and the transmission of a phantom usually result in psychic aphasia. The melancholy carriers of a crypt or of a secret do not speak. At most, they are spoken through in a laconic fashion. The reader’s task then is to attempt to excavate in a text a system of expressive traces that betray the existence of a crypt and a phantom in the

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subject. These subterranean expressive traces work against signification and undermine the apparent meaning of a text. They are symptoms of improper burials. Literary analysis enacts a Gothic impulse and becomes the necromantic art of bringing the dead back. There is always a remainder in signification, something that remains “undead,” neither alive as a thing outside language, nor transformed into a sign in the process of symbolization, something that our structures, our linguistic and symbolic structures cannot assimilate. The theory of the textual crypt, therefore, generates a theory of readability. Reading involves taking on the perspective of the ghost, which is always slanted and anamorphic. Reading is always reading for displacements. There is of course a danger in turning cryptonymic reading into a system. Tracking “magic words” and hidden secrets in a text can lead to interpretative excesses, as a text offers no resistance and cannot be treated as a subject of transference.22 Also, unearthing “magic words” to crack the secret of the text, unbeknown to its author, closes up the open-endedness at the heart of the literary process and language by assigning precise meanings to clearly identified secrets. Encrypting rather than decrypting seems to me the major move of the Gothic. I believe therefore that cryptonymy should be seen a poetics rather than a hermeneutics. Cryptonymy is concerned with language to the extent that it is radically cut off from its semantic rootedness, and as such it does not try to name or exorcize ghosts. The return to order and knowledge is an effect of cryptonymic reading, not a goal. Crytonymy does not aim at giving answers but at problematizing the meaning of signs. Indeed, the impact of Abraham and Torok not only on psychoanalysis but also on the philosophy of language and literary studies is two-fold. It comes on the one hand from the way they identify a “kernel” of absence, an “unthought,”23 a “non-presence” at the core of discourse and on the other hand, from the central place they give to introjection and incorporation in their approach to language. Recovering hidden meanings is secondary to uncovering the core of absence in language. In a truly programmatic passage from The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham asks the most important questions at the heart of literature: “how to include in a discourse—in any one whatever—the very thing which, being the precondition of discourse, fundamentally escapes it. If non-presence, the kernel and ultimate ground of all discourse is made to speak, can it, must it, make itself heard in and through presence to self?”24 Opening up the notion of discourse to the “unstated” in discourse, Abraham opens up the questions of the subject as non-place and as not fully

Introduction

7

knowable and of the limits of the communicable in language. Interpretation becomes the tracking down, against the grain of the text, of the kernel of absence, of what resists assimilation and remains inaccessible to symbolization. Cryptonymy and phantomatic transmissions suggest new ways of approaching textuality and textual productions in terms of loss and more precisely in terms of the ability to process loss. Introjection, the working through the loss, and incorporation, the morbid denial of the reality of death, can be instrumental in assessing the status of literary and artistic productions. Mourning is at the origin of language and introjection is the model behind most textual and artistic production: we process and overcome death through signs, words and artistic creation. Commenting on Husserl’s philosophy of signification, Derrida reflects on the fact that every linguistic utterance is structurally elegiac and testamentary and that every speech act is a vibration of the void from which it emanates: “my death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I . . . The statement ‘I am alive’ is accompanied by my being dead, and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead. This is not an extraordinary tale by Poe but the ordinary story of language.”25 Gothic Hauntings analyzes the connection between writing and loss or language and mourning, which in Derrida’s terms constitutes the “ordinary story of language,” precisely as if it were “an extraordinary tale by Poe,” that is to say as a gothic text and via the Gothic tradition in order to show that although it is in the nature of art, creativity and symbolical constructions to introject loss and therefore to produce works of mourning, some forms of art display an impossibility to mourn. Gothic texts are not interested in exorcising the ghosts they harbor, even if they explain them away at the end of the narratives, or in accepting death as inevitable. Gothic texts are the proof that there are melancholy texts, texts where writing does not function like a funeral rite and where wounds are not healed by words. The words of such texts hide a painful silence. They are hollowed out, depleted of affect and always beside the point. They do not try to communicate. The purpose of this study is to show that to read is to be willing to become the heir of the incommunicable in a text, and to lend an ear or give a voice to the dead as they inevitably return in writing.

1 Transgenerational Haunting: The Subject as Other

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. —Goethe, Faust1

The Castle of Otranto as “Nec-romance” Psychoanalysis formalized the principle of an intrapsychic unconscious determinism as the source of the existence and specificity of the subject. A subject constantly negotiates between repression and a return of the repressed. But Freud himself had the intuition that the psyche was more than a monadic entity. In Totem and Taboo in particular, the hypothesis of psychic transmission is envisaged in the form of cultural inheritance. A culture survives on the transmission of taboos for instance, and Freud sees the subject’s superego as also partly socially and culturally inherited. The subject is an intersubject, a subject in a group, at the same time an independent entity and a mere link in the chain of generations. But, if at the origin of the individual psyche and of the constitution of the self, there is always, in part, another or others, then the subject must be seen as inheriting not simply a cultural identity but also the repressed of his culture. That a subject is shaped by the desires and the unconscious of those who, like the parents in the first place, nourish and determine his sense of self through identification and projection is a key intuition at the core of the work of French psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok on the one hand and Laplanche on the other hand. Their research concentrates precisely on this shift in transgenerational transmission from the communicated to the incommunicable and the ghostly.2 Nothing is ever abolished that does not resurface in one way or another in the shape of an enigma, a sign or a phantomatic presence 8

Transgenerational Haunting 9

in a later generation. For Freud already, transgenerational transmission included a dimension of “haunting,” as one inherits the desire and unsaid that are part of the unconscious of another.3 But the concepts of secret (for Abraham and Torok) and of enigmatic signifier for Laplanche clearly show that, in the perspective of an intersubjective psyche, the subject inherits a defect in the transmission, a gap, a foreclosed meaning rather than a message, however cryptic. Unless it is worked through, a trauma, a secret will be passed to the next generation in the form of phobia, gestures, incomprehensible symptoms that do not emerge from individual experience but are the result of unconscious transmissions. The subject feels as if he were spoken through. He becomes a “phantom carrier,” the mere conveyor of unconscious messages beyond the scope of his own individual life. Alienated in the psyche of another or several others, the “subject” of the Gothic and the Fantastic represents the most extreme example of the hypothesis of an intersubjective production of the psyche. The Gothic, as Leslie Fiedler remarks, can best be seen as a “pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement.”4 The Gothic exhibits its texts as mere case studies on the question of inheritance and transmission in particular through the endless reworking of illegitimacy as a “self-conscious trope of secrecy”5 that ultimately signs the demise of the subject as an autonomous individual. Illegitimacy is the symptom of all transgenerational haunting conceived as the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. Haunting is primarily the unconscious transmission of an unsayable, unnameable secret, which, like the secret of an unnameable, unacknowledged child, is passed from generation to generation. Most ghost stories are centered on the theme of family inheritance and dynasty, with the ghost, a vestige from another time, haunting the castle, either in the role of claimant or protector of the title.6 This theme is in fact the impetus behind the Gothic as Horace Walpole defines it in the programmatic “Preface to the First Edition” of The Castle of Otranto.7 The Gothic is concerned primarily with the way “the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third or fourth generation.”8 “Although,” as Helene Moglen reminds us, “The Castle of Otranto is ostensibly a political fiction that advocates legitimate succession and the reinstatement of an older socioeconomic order, it is essentially concerned (like all gothic novels) with intrafamilial relations that determine the origins and development of the self.”9 But, in Walpole’s fiction, the origin of the self is precisely what proves questionable in a text that stages issues of legitimacy in order to undermine legitimacy. The Gothic enacts the idea of transgenerational haunting.

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A plot summary of Walpole’s text will illustrate how its narrative stages several generations caught in a web of unconscious transmissions, and how the narrative thread is constantly enmeshed in transgenerational transmissions. The younger generation, victimized by the generation of the fathers—essentially Manfred the tyrant—is forced to reenact dramas that are not contemporary with them. On the other hand, the generation of the fathers, Manfred and Father Jerome, themselves the receptacles of secrets that control their lives without their knowledge, are haunted by the untold stories and sins from previous generations. The tale starts on the birthday of Conrad, Manfred’s son and heir to Otranto. It is also his wedding day and it turns out to be the day of his death as he is crushed under a huge helmet fallen from the sky. This death seems to bring home an old prophecy according to which the castle and lordship of Otranto will pass from its present owner when the real owner is grown too large to inhabit it. Manfred immediately tries to divorce his aging wife, Hippolita, in order to marry his almost daughter-in-law Isabella as she alone can give birth to strong sons and ensure the continuation of his race and name. Irresistibly drawn to the Castle by an unknown force beyond his understanding, Theodore, a peasant boy, claims that the helmet is that of the statue of Alphonso. Manfred, outraged, has him put in prison. There he falls in love with Manfred’s daughter, Matilda, and, as he tries to escape with her help; he saves Isabella who is also trying to flee from Manfred. Theodore is caught and condemned to death. Father Jerome, come to give him the last sacraments, recognizes him as his own long-lost son. Manfred spares Theodore in the hope that Father Jerome will favor his divorce plans. Meanwhile, Isabella’s father returns from a pilgrimage, bearing a huge sword, and decides to give assent to the union between Isabella and Manfred in the hope that he in turn can marry Matilda. Matilda who loves Theodore flees to the church of Saint Nicholas where Manfred accidentally kills her. The form of Alphonso then appears, shattering the walls of the castle and reveals that Theodore is his true heir. This completes a series of fantastic moments when the gigantic and fragmented ghostly body takes possession of the castle. Manfred confesses to the crimes of usurpation of his grandfather, abdicates and retires in a convent. Isabella marries Theodore who remains devastated by the loss of his beloved princess Matilda. Walpole’s novel occupies a pivotal position in our literary tradition because it is both a text about haunting and a haunted text. Indeed, The Castle of Otranto, with all its apparitions and supernatural elements, offers a way into its own writing mode. It reveals writing as a two-sided

Transgenerational Haunting 11

process. In the same gesture, writing imposes order in a possible world while the incessant murmur of chaos hollows out the very structures of meaning. Walpole’s work pins itself precisely at the point where the text shows its intrinsic texture: a mesh of holes and threads, warp and woof, which together only can constitute a fabric, the fabric of writing. Meaning is always on the brink of collapse, and that is its only chance of being. Thus, The Castle of Otranto disguises itself as a “romance” of a new type, but it does so in the same way as its hero disguises himself as a knight: the armor, a symbol of social success, power and order, does not quite fit and only points to its own inadequacy, to the gaps and the discrepancies. The preface to the second edition in particular clearly points to the ambiguous status of the text in literary tradition and to the ambiguous status of writing. The novel fashions its own carapace: it presents itself as an attempt to blend the supernatural and the real in order to be more faithful to the rules of probability and to explore the way people react in extraordinary situations. The supernatural, a force of chaos and disorder is paradoxically evoked, but immediately contained, as a means to achieve greater verisimilitude and truthfulness and in a spirit of conciliation of the contraries. In a gesture of containment of the inadmissible supernatural, representation is condemned to the limits of the Symbolic. In the same way, the epigraph to the second edition, misquoting Horace, emphasizes an unsustainable paradox: “idle fancies should be shaped so that nevertheless head and foot are assigned to a single shape.”10 In Horace’s original meaning, idle fancies distort and reshuffle the real so much so that the sense of the whole can never be recovered and “neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape.” In Walpole’s mind, writing is “shaping” and homogenizing, and the work of art becomes the battleground between two forces: a force of order in which the supernatural has to fit the rules of our natural universe, and a counterforce that both strives toward idleness and thrives on chance encounters between words and ideas. At the threshold of his novel, Walpole’s avowed goal is to try and hold tight to order, to the flow of writing against the counterflow of sheer chaos that always inhabits writing. Yet, within the system and the armor, subversion intervenes, in the irreducible contra-diction of “nevertheless.” In Walpole’s novel, the “single shape” corresponds indeed to the logical and teleological narrative of revenge and retribution, which creates the homogeneous story line in perfect conformity with our social world. But, “idle fancies” cutting through this narrative line create an anti-system and an antinarrative whose meanderings

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contradict all the rules of communication, but need those rules as a host for their ghostly meanings to flourish. The haunting idle fancies and the linear logic of the surface narrative are locked up in a parasitic relationship. Haunting functions at the limit of the text, challenging the very notion of textual limits and ultimately undermining the unity of the text as closed system of meaning. The “new Romance” as defined by Walpole becomes the place of haunting, precisely insofar as it seems to promote verisimilitude while accommodating “idle fancies” by laterally giving way to unreadable messages which do not fit in the logic of the text. “Romance” becomes “nec-romance,” that is the “site” or “para-site” of the raising of the dead.11 In the very same way as Manfred the tyrant obscurely fears Theodore, “a necromancer” in his eyes, shunning him and imprisoning him behind bars, the text also, like a grid or a prison-house, tries to control the inassimilable “nec-romance” and the impossible voice of the dead it harbors. In The Castle of Otranto, paper ghosts, at the narrative level, are but the symptom of real phantoms in the linguistic structure of the text. “Manfred’s behavior reminds us of Hamlet’s only so we can smile at its comparative inadequacy and indeed at the inadequacy of the ghost,” says Punter.12 The story of “the revisiting of the sins of the fathers upon their children” is only superficially a mock ghost story. In fact, gradually, the spatiotemporal frame of the text yields under the pressure of a countercurrent of heterogeneous ghostly messages. Obsessively, a scene, which exceeds the narrative limits of the text, is being reenacted and a secret, for which the text cannot account, is given vent. This scene, which does not stage ghosts, is nonetheless a scene of transgenerational haunting. But before going into the details of the echoic destructuration of the narrative line, a closer look at the frame and armor of a text, which will prove too small for its ghostly inhabitant, is necessary. The narrative line presents a form of conservative and mythological discourse from a sacred past to a profane present redeemed by the initiation of a youth. It unfolds a visible teleological temporality from Alphonso (A), the origin of the line, to Theodore (T), the gift of God, the more-than-man. In between, two negative moments of chaos interfere with divine order: Ricardo murders Alphonso and, in the present of the text, Manfred, his descendant, proves an incestuous infanticide. The narrative moves the reader through the various stages of a ritualistic initiation in which the hero and rightful heir, grows from childhood to adulthood. Theodore comes from the vault, an analog for feminine space or womb, then works his

Transgenerational Haunting 13

way through the house until, having been freed from his cell by Matilda and dressed like a knight, he can walk outside and claim this new manly identity as his own, thus proving worthy of Alphonso’s inheritance and becoming the master of the castle. Knighthood is manhood. The narrative line defines temporality in terms of progression from Alphonso, the Alpha of all beginnings, via Manfred or “man,” the representative of fallen humanity, to Theodore, the figure of the redeemer, closer to God (“Theo”). This teleological perspective reflects the working of discourse as a system of protection: distributing the elements of the narrative along the lines of “before,” “during” and “after,” it eliminates the possibility of “no time.” Nothing can escape the grid of diachronic oppositions: “before” is different from “after,” and “during” exists in contrast with “before” and “after”. Opposition is the condition of discourse and temporality. Discourse is the ordering of data in a series of positions where they become significant. The function of diachrony in the production of signification clearly appears in the universal drama that The Castle of Otranto stages so perfectly: Walpole’s story, as many critics have noted, corresponds to the description Lacan gives of the birth of the subject: The mirror stage is a drama whose inner dynamic moves rapidly from insufficiency to anticipation—and which, for the subject caught in the snares of spatial identification, fashions the series of fantasies that runs from an image of a fragmented body to what we may call the orthopedic vision of its totality—and to the armor donned at last, of an alienating identity, whose rigid structure will shape all the subject’s future mental development.13 From his/her position of insufficiency to anticipation, the experience of the formation of the subject is inherently dependent on a structure. This very rigid structure allows the substitution of identification (the subject “becomes” and tends toward the image) for identity (the subject never “is” the image). The structure of identification functions like a rigid armor. It is a frame, a framing in time and space. It draws the axis of future and past and reorganizes the subject along the constraints of this diachronic opposition in which the position of the present vanishes. One “becomes” a subject, by displacement, because one can never “be” the subject. Only the proleptic “orthopedic vision of a totality,” to resume Lacan’s formula, allows the subject literally to stand up, walk “straight” and speak, as if he was himself/herself. “In order to speak, in order to make oneself understood,” Catherine Clement explains,

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“one needs the knight in shining armor, armed with an identity, this knight that the infant staring at his own image in the mirror has begun to become.”14 This displacement in time is also a shift in space from impossible identity to alienated identity: “I” is always another, the image of and from another. In Walpole’s novel, Theodore follows every step of the initiation into temporality and into the world of adulthood. Unaware of his true identity at the beginning of the story, he soon gets caught up in an image that he first does not recognize as his own. The helmet under which he is imprisoned, therefore, is too big for his head. But he gradually grows to see himself as the hero reflected in his father’s and Matilda’s eyes. He “becomes” the image in the portrait of Alphonso in the gallery. The prophecy, the proleptic vision of a totality, is realized by identification, by the displacement in time and space of identity into identification. The line of the story is precisely that of the growth of a hero into the knight in armor, armed with an identity not his own. But the straight line of narrative progression, which follows the line of the constitution of the subject and the mythic line of sin and redemption, is drawn by exclusion. Whatever does not fit the structure or streamline is left out and excluded. Yet traces of the irreducible leftovers emerge in the narrative as so many shadows that are not accounted for but cannot be brushed aside. These traces that haunt the text seem to be of a nature so heterogeneous to the text that they are hardly decipherable: they divert the process of signification away from the signifiers and confer upon them a depth and ambiguity that runs counter to the rules of communication. Walpole’s novel thematically enacts the haunting at the heart of the process of writing in a key scene, which typically takes place in the subterranean zones of the castle. Isabella and Theodore meet in the hidden recesses of Otranto in their attempt to escape the tyrant who would control their future. The episode utterly undermines the narrative structure in its teleological organization and undercuts the prospect of the hero’s linear development. The very curves and dead ends of the “intricate cloisters” (25) in the lower part of the edifice mimic the meanderings of meaning and the destructuration of the narrative frame. In this space, Theodore and Isabella come to reenact a drama that is not theirs and is not contemporaneous with the action of the text. Thus, progression along the axis of the past and the future is radically undercut. In Otranto what is about to happen has already happened, proposing an alternative to the visible temporality of repression. Through repression alone what is still always active in the psyche can appear as past.

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The scene unwittingly played against the grain of the narrative by Theodore and Isabella reenacts the secret that remains hushed in Jerome’s revelations at the very end of the tale. Jerome’s narrative openly recounts the marriage between Alphonso and Theodore’s grandmother, thus legitimizing the structure of anticipation that turns Theodore into the true heir of Otranto as he develops into the true hero of the story. Yet an underground and silent scene on page 27 runs counter to the open meaning of Jerome’s narrative on page 110: the wedding seems never to have taken place. The underground scene mimics visually the unutterable secret of someone else, Victoria, Theodore’s grandmother. It is the pivotal moment of the “nec-romance” in which ghostly messages come to be expressed by channels other than verbal communication. The whole scene revolves around the description of the lock to the hidden door and the spring that opens it up: “[Isabella] directed the stranger to search likewise for a smooth piece of brass enclosed in one of the stones. That, said she, is the lock, which opens with a spring, of which I know the secret” (27). The trap door, unlocked by the spring, is actually opened by an “iron ring” (27). Isabella then invites Theodore to “lift up the door and follow her” (27). On one level, this scene is clearly proleptic and it anticipates the future union of the two heroes: the ring they will exchange in wedlock determines their lot. But more importantly, it is also analeptic and points to another wedlock the secret of which remains locked up in words that cannot be uttered. Alphonso and Victoria’s wedding never took place. The ring that should have symbolized their union is an “iron ring,” because the groom was bound by “the vows of arms” only (110). Theodore is thus connected to the “spring of the lock” in several ways. In the first place, this scene announces his legitimacy while at the same time it rehearses his illegitimacy. He is the out-of-wedlock offspring of a soldier married to his cause rather than a bride. The “authentic writing” that Jerome kept in his possession seems to be annulled by stronger voices that speak in another tongue and in gestures and puns in perfect contradiction with the avowed message. The same subterranean yet unavowed meaning is conveyed in another gesture, that of Bianca rubbing the ring that Manfred has just given her (page 99): as she rubs it there is heard the “rattling of an armor”—the armor of him, now eternally remorseful, who chose war and left Victoria pregnant. The underground episode flattens out the temporal structure of the narrative and substitutes a secret logic for that of prophetic retribution. In this logic, words are treated as things, rebuses, rather than substitute for things. Wedlock becomes lock and offsprings are springs.

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In the discrepancy between visual puns and verbal messages lies the true ghostly nature of The Castle of Otranto as nec-romance and haunted writing. Such puns introduce elements in signification for which signification cannot account. The portrait of Manfred’s ancestor for instance, hanging over the bench where the tyrant and Isabella were sitting, starts “walking sedately” as Manfred proposes to his almost daughterin-law (24). The expression to “walk sedately” which literally means to walk and sit, lays bare the paradox of all representation that tries to fix movement and life. While the romance supposedly represents reality, its nec-romantic underside inscribes its unsayable message in the gap between presentation (to walk) and representation (to sit for a painting). Language in the novel seems to fail at signifying and always carries contradictory messages. The emergence in the text of what will become another commonplace of the Gothic (where statues or paintings are prone to walking and the dead to being alive), namely that identity is granted only through identification and mirroring, is also characteristic of the way the novel at the same time sets the rules and breaks them. The origin of the subject is deeply set into question. On the one hand, the subject is alienated in an image of the other that he inherits and must make his. On the other hand, this transmission is tainted with illegitimacy. Walpole’s novel, like most novels of the time in which the emerging bourgeoisie desperately tried to legitimize itself, is a novel concerned with establishing a line of descent. On the surface, legitimacy is confirmed by the fall of Manfred the usurper. But against the paternal line and narrative, a secret line, a “maternal” line whispers that, at the source of the family line of Otranto there was deviance, and at the basis of all writing lies the gap of unproven origin.15 The confusion around identity and origin, which unsettles the very notion of subjectivity, is manifested by the linguistic indiscrimination that surrounds the denomination of the characters. “Princess,” for instance, is one signifier for too many referents, as if the signifier could not designate any reference at all. Because identity is so problematic in the novel, we are left with nouns that no longer bear a direct correspondence with the object they should represent. Thus, Theodore is at a loss to find out who the dying princess is (53). Is it Matilda, Isabella, Victoria or Hippolita? In any case is there any difference between these characters bound to reproduce each other in behavior and function? Ultimately the story of the making of a hero loses its ground as the hero gradually moves further into the structure of the narrative and the armor of his ancestor. He becomes less himself and more the mere

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instrument of endless repetition. The younger generation is caught in revolving dramas that swallow them into somebody else’s story. Caught in the secret of illegitimacy that tarnished Victoria and Alphonso’s lives, they become the empty vessels that echo and replay Manfred and Hippolita’s incestuous wedlock. Isabella and Theodore too are related to the third or fourth generation, and in the same way as Hippolita was contracted to someone other than her cousin Manfred, Isabella was contracted to Conrad and Theodore had promised love to Matilda. So the “long-restless prince’s shade” (Alphonso’s ghost) whose moaning inaugurates the narrative of retribution still projects its shadowy presence laterally at the end of a narrative that cannot truly end. The “prince’s shade” falls on more shades: a “princess’s shade,” Victoria, as her secret is disclosed in the subterranean scene where Isabella and Theodore find the spring and unlock the hidden world of Otranto. The “prince’s shade” also falls on the shade of another princess: the ghost of unmournable Matilda, which forever inhabits the patent gap in all communication between Theodore and Isabella. Far from closing on the promise of a happy future, the text ends up on the sighs and the wounds of melancholia. The voices of the dead surreptitiously permeate the text. They refuse to die in the signs that would signify their absence. Victoria and Matilda haunt the story of Theodore’s life. Isabella is condemned to talk about Matilda and to tell again, and Theodore to listen endlessly to a tale that can have no beginning and no end. Repetition and duplication characterize the narrative at the end of the novel. Isabella represents and reproduces the story of Matilda. The excluded become undead again, and the romance turns into a nec-romance, a story of the dead. Walpole’s novel explores writing as haunting. The nec-romance is haunted by the shadow of unconfessed sins (here an illegitimate birth) or unaccepted deaths (Matilda’s overhanging presence in the narrative of the formation of a hero). Haunting is perceptible only in and as the gaps of language when communication ceases to function. But it is Matilda who, indirectly, gives the reader the true dimension of the novel: not only are the “sins of the fathers visited on their children to the third or fourth generation,” as the author’s preface explains, but also, “if a parent lets fall a word and wishes it recalled, it is not for a child to utter it” (39). Matilda here exposes the functioning of secret transmission or haunted language. “Recalled” should be understood in at least two different and contradictory ways: repressed and canceled on the one hand but, on the other hand, called again and repeated. It is not for a child to utter it, yet “a child,” continues Matilda, “ought to

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have no ears or eyes but as a parent directs” (39). In the same way as the secrets of the parents visit their children by accident when “words fall,” like things, secrets visit the text in the form of inassimilable messages. The child is condemned to repeat the secret of the parent, that is, condemned to “have ears and eyes as directed” but, at the same time, also condemned never to “utter it,” never to make it communicable in an open structure of meaning.

Phantomatic transmissions: Abraham and Torok and the Gothic The research of the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok provides a terminology for the principle at work in haunted writing as it is demonstrated in The Castle of Otranto. Their work on the crypt and the phantom help outline a framework for looking at Gothic texts. The basic premise is that secrets, that is to say dramas or situations transmitted without being stated, will be passed on to the next generation if they are not worked through. The sins of the fathers visited on the children form within the recipient a “phantom,” which Abraham describes as “the work in the unconscious of the unsayable secret of another. It passes from the parent’s unconscious into the child’s.”16 The phantom creates within the subject a “nescience” that is an unknown knowledge. It is a stranger within the subject; a foreign body that does not result from the repression of the subject but rather from the unsaid that passes unknowingly from the unconscious of the loved object into the subject: Should the child have parents “with secrets,” parents whose speech is not exactly complementary to their unstated repressions, he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge—a nescience—subjected to a form of “repression” before the fact. The buried speech of the parent becomes a dead gap, without a burial place, in the child. This unknown phantom comes back from the unconscious to haunt and leads to phobias, madness and obsessions. Its effect can persist through generations and determine the fate of an entire family.17 This definition strangely echoes Walpole’s gothic moral: haunting is what is transmitted from generation to generation and condemns the younger generations to be the mere vessel for narratives and dramas outside of their control and their time frame. A revision of extant

Transgenerational Haunting 19

conceptions of textual as well as subjective boundaries becomes necessary to understand how the Gothic devises a tropology of haunting (composed of figures such as ghosts, revenants, phantoms or doubles) to invoke, at the level of the narrative, the existence of a transindividual psychic life. Staging unspeakable dramas cryptically inscribed in the texts, the Gothic pushes the boundaries of readability. It is not so much the content of a secret that matters, but rather the imprint it has left over generations, the system of expressive traces it draws. This system is at the service of what Abraham and Torok call “preservative repression.” Instead of a mere return of the repressed, the text must deploy a whole range of rhetorical figures to perform the work of linguistic encryptment. The secret from one generation must be sealed off and yet indirectly expressed through gestures, moods, affect of another generation. Figures that combine revelation and concealment will become the channel of this unspoken communication. Homophony, anagrams, semantic ambiguities or metonymy for instance force the secret in and yet beside the text. The shift from ghost story to phantomatic transmission which is indeed the true originality of Walpole’s novel, and in its wake of the whole Gothic tradition, can best be approached via another text that haunts The Castle of Otranto and is itself haunted by a ghost who turns out to be a mere metaphor for an unspeakable secret, a “phantom”: Hamlet. In “The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act,”18 Abraham writes a fictitious sequel to Shakespeare’s play, a sixth act in which he reconstitutes a drama that occurred beyond the time frame given in the play. Traces of this drama can be deciphered in the tragedy. These traces alone, in Abraham’s mind, can account for King Hamlet’s apparition, Hamlet’s procrastination and for the death of the six characters, all the victims of the devastating effects of previous crimes. The presence of Hamlet in The Castle of Otranto is more than the intertextual joke that some critics have noticed.19 The ghost of the “father text” recurs in Walpole’s novel, like the sins of the father that bear on the child, as a pointer that invites lateral readings into the romance. The common denominator between the two texts is the presence of a ghost as a pretext: in the same way as in Hamlet, according to Abraham, the “ghost returns to haunt with the intent of lying,”20 in Otranto, the ghost also provides revelations that are false and deceptive. King Hamlet’s secret of vengeance masks the secret of his and Polonius’ treacherous poisoning of King Fortinbras, which took place some 30 years previous to the action of the play, on the day of Hamlet’s birth. The secret becomes apparent in the actions of the younger generation condemned to mimic and repeat a crime of which

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they have no knowledge. The duel between Hamlet and Laertes is made meaningful in the light of another duel that Horatio reports in Act I. The madness of Ophelia, this “poison of deep grief” in Claudius’ words, also accounts for the criminal nature of a duel between King Hamlet and King Fortinbras where poison played a part. Laertes, Ophelia and Hamlet are all “phantom carriers.” Inhabited by a transgenerational secret, they perform acts that pertain to a logical frame outside the scope of their understanding. Hamlet’s hesitations, then, signal his phantomatic haunting, and his confusion is provoked by the incredulous suspicion he feels that something remained hidden of the life of the dead King. His paralysis is the result of conflicting impulses: those he inherits are impulses of guilt and those he feels are moves of revenge. “Hamlet’s psychic inheritance of the secret occurs through the tacit transmission of his mother, whose thwarted love for dead Fortinbras of Norway motivates her complicity in poisoning King Hamlet.”21 In a similar way, in Walpole’s text, Alphonso’s vengeful ghost is a mere subterfuge for the shame of an illegitimate relationship that could not be made public. This other secret remains hidden in words that are selected both to reveal it and hide it. Such are the words of the prophecy Frederick discovers written on the saber: Where’er a casque that suits this sword is found, With perils is thy daughter compass’d round: Alphonso’s blood alone can save the maid, And quiet a long-restless prince’s shade. (79) Theodore’s impatience at the revelation of the prophecy betrays the presence of the phantom in him and invites a lateral reading or reinterpretation of the lines. This lateral reading is what Isabella calls a “glossing” (79). In “the glossing of a peasant’s son,” Theodore’s lineage is deviously stated in contradiction with the plot line. The only name he can claim is that of Falconara, like his father, Jerome. Theodore is the “casque that suits this sword,” that is the “bird” (“casque”) or falcon that suits this sword. Falconara, or falcon, is the name he finally discovers despite the prophecy. The ghost comes back to crown the bearer of this name with his helmet and to give him his sword, rather than his name. More than to ensure revenge and retribution, the ghost comes back in search of atonement. The rules of haunting determine the line of action with their own logic. On the one hand, the haunted individual must at all cost maintain

Transgenerational Haunting 21

his or her ignorance of the secret. On the other hand, he/she must also give vent to the secret. This is why Theodore’s initiation leads him to the vault where his gestures betray the presence in him of a secret not his own, a secret that he can only reenact. His impossible love for Matilda also obeys the logic of the phantom: Theodore, like Alphonso, will not marry the object of his love. Instead, he is condemned to replicate the incestuous pattern of Manfred and Hippolita’s marriage of reason. Told or untold, the sins of the fathers influence the lives of the younger generations with subtle chaos even as order is apparently restored. Because the phantom results from the transmission of the unconscious of the parent to the unconscious of the child, it is important to concentrate on the moment and mechanics of transmission in order to understand how language can work as a phantom carrier and haunt texts with messages that go against the rules of communicability and force us to read and listen differently. Abraham’s analysis of the Freudian “fort-da,” when the child plays a game of absence-presence with a reel of string, and thus learns to master the principle of rules of symbolization, clearly emphasizes the double nature of language and the way in which communication is possible only if one aspect of this double nature is repressed. Language is both medium and matter, but it can only become a vehicle for messages when its material side is suppressed. Yet as it loses its materiality, language necessarily hollows out, and unconscious meanings burrow their way through the system. Thus, as Abraham reminds us, before the fort-da, the child has no conscious or unconscious existence beyond his mother’s and his/her language is purely material: “the words of the mother are like her breasts, her hair, her gestures, her emotional being with its harmonies and contradictions . . . The words of the mother are pieces of the mother.”22 The experience of symbolization corresponds to the moment when words are “decentered from the mother so as to designate objective events.”23 Instead of being related to the conscious and unconscious life of the mother, words now exist independently as a means to convey the world, and the child exists independently, endowed with his own conscious-unconscious makeup. Yet, in the act of symbolization, the child gets rid of the parental unconscious only superficially. It remains, inassimilable, a phantom, a “non-spoken,” transmitted as lacuna. The child inherits the psychic topology of the mother in the very words that allow him/her to separate from the maternal figure, and his/her speech is haunted by elements of dramas actively unknown to him/her. Thus, according to Abraham, little Ernest, Freud’s grandchild, even as he discovers the Symbolic in the approximate adequacy of the world and the word in the phonematic

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difference “o-o-a-a,” becomes the carrier of his mother’s own psychic wound. In hidden layers and in silence, the words of Ernest tie him to her unconscious drama. Autonomy is vouchsafed precisely as it is denied. Unlike what Freud asserts, “fort-da” is not just Ernest’s dramatization and symbolization of presence and absence. It is also, according to Abraham and Torok, Sophie Freud’s unconscious drama: her husband is far away, absent, “fort,” on the war front. For his absence, Sophie finds a substitute: Ernest’s grandfather, “opa.” Opa is unconsciously for Sophie like a husband, like the “photographer Halsberstadt,” her husband, or more than him. Ernest looking at himself in the mirror and saying: “baby o-o-o,” that is “baby is gone,” and not “baby a-a,” “baby is here,” betrays the confusion between the two figures. Sophie’s desire for her father and ambiguous feeling for a husband who might just be a substitute for the father surfaces in Ernest’s linguistic confusion. The “fort-da” also reflects “the repression in the mother of the non-identity of the father and the husband.”24 Entering into the Symbolic, the child carries within his language the density of somebody else’s unconscious. Sometimes, this density accidentally resurfaces to trouble the clarity of communication. Questionable as it may be in its actual conclusions, Abraham’s reconstruction of the “fort-da” as the symbolic dramatization not only of the child’s drives but also of the unconscious data he inherits opens up new possibilities of tackling haunting in language. Language is always “from the other,” inherited and heavy with history. Language differs from other media because of its pretense at transparency and immateriality. But such a pretense can only be based on repression. “Words only,” Abraham explains, “have a double polarity, referring—thanks to phonematic presence—to the polarity that has been repressed and at the same time the polarity openly aimed at as absent objectivity.”25 Because words have both a repressed pole (in which both the repressed from the subject and the repressed from others are inscribed) and an objective pole, words are necessarily ambiguous. Portions of meaning and portions of signifieds that are properly phantomatic, that is to say, conveyed without the knowledge of their recipient, potentially haunt all messages. Literary interpretation, in this perspective, also needs to focus on the lateral reconstruction of the spectral dimension of words that betray in the text secret wounds and dramas actively unspoken. Its object is to study the signs of chaos and confusion that reveal the other side of language. “The phantom,” according to Abraham, “is sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from

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within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression. Finally, it gives rise to endless repetition and more often than not, eludes rationalization.”26 In a note to Abraham’s unfinished seminar, Maria Torok remarks that “the gnomes wreaking havoc” are not simply “invisible beings controlling from within the elements of the Earth,” but also “knowledge, crippled knowledge or nescience.”27 The other “in” language is also the other “of” language, that is, language working against itself. The phantom, which Abraham calls “the dead in the word,”28 is heterogeneous to the structures and the language of the subject. It creates chaos in the logic of discourse and draws the structure of language toward the unorganized and thus the organic. The other of language is the irreducible materiality that runs counter to the flow of the symbolic. It is the place where, in language, the material unity with the other—for Abraham and Torok, the mother of “dual unity”—is reinscribed.

Enigmatic signifiers and seduction (Laplanche): “Intersign” by Villiers de L’Isle Adam 29 Language is not simply a transparent medium. There are residues in language of something that is not language. These residues are properly uncanny. They are foreign to the message and live a life of their own within the words of the subject who unknowingly conveys them. That the language of the subject is in part foreign to him/her and bears traces of modes of expression that do not obey the rules of the symbolic is also the presupposition of Laplanche’s theory of “enigmatic signifiers.” For Laplanche, the unconscious is the precondition of language. His theory ultimately presents communication not as a direct dialogical experience but as a unilateral transmission, a seduction, in which non-translatable elements are being conveyed. Laplanche sees artistic production, for instance, as the reworking of a trauma or an enigmatic message. “When we think we are creating,” Laplanche explains, “we are always being worked by foreign messages . . . Story telling releases a trauma which then has a life of its own in the recipient.”30 For the psychoanalyst, literature is always uncanny because it carries messages that are in part untranslatable. These messages, which originate in the unconscious of the author, become part of the unconscious of the reader who can never decipher them completely. Writing is seduction rather than communication: the reader is partly led astray by the implicit message that remains uncontrollable behind the explicit message. In any message, there are always unconscious elements that in turn become part of the unconscious of the reader and over which the reader has

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24

no control. These unconscious elements invade him and haunt him unknowingly because they cannot be understood. Such a conception of writing, speaking, gesturing and communicating as means of transmission of the unconscious, clearly points to the idea of an intersubjective unconscious that would operate from parent to child or writer to reader. Messages are enigmatic, not just because they are polysemic and need to be translated and interpreted. They are enigmatic because part of the meaning remains hidden not only from the recipient but also from the sender. An enigma, for Laplanche, is always doubly enigmatic; it comes from someone’s unconscious and becomes part of the subject’s unconscious. Laplanche illustrates this point by referring to the Sphinx, the very embodiment of the enigmatic: “you cannot think that she knew the answer to her enigma, because the enigma was such a problem for her that when it was solved by Oedipus she killed herself as it was something unbearable to her, revealing to her something of her unconscious.”31 Our conscious messages are always infiltrated by unconscious ones, which remain unconscious because they are traumatic. Communication, in this perspective, therefore cannot be dissociated from haunting, in that every message conveys a subtext, which structures the signifying chain as a lacuna. Seduction is the term Laplanche ascribes to the passive transmission he sees operating in the relationship of the child and the adult world for instance, or more generally in any situation of communication. Seduction is a form of haunting. It brings into play an active and a passive pole in a situation that Laplanche calls “traumatic” because the child’s immature psychic apparatus is lured by what he/she does not understand of the message voiced by the more mature adult psyche (even though the adult psyche is also split, as the adult has no mastery over his own unconscious input in the encounter with the child). The trauma lies in the intrusion of unconscious fantasies from the adult world into the child’s universe. Laplanche’s classic instance of the seductive power of communication is what he calls “primal seduction” or the seduction through maternal care. “Primal seduction” is not seen as a fantasy but as a communication situation.32 The breast is for Laplanche an example of the enigmatic signifier: “every gesture of the adult is a signifier for the child . . . A thing like the breast is not an object, but a message presented to the child.”33 The breast, apart from satisfying the needs of the child, is an agent of maternal fantasy. It is a locus of pleasure for the mother and therefore transmits a lost signifier, lost on the child, ill-equipped to receive it in its opacity and complexity, and yet not entirely lost since the child is bound to feel how, for the mother, the breast is the site of sexual stimulation.

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The communication between mother and child, then, is not a dialogue in which the need of a child will be answered by the nourishment the mother will provide. It is the model for all future adult–child relation: In the primal situation we have, then, a child whose ability to adapt is real but limited, weak and waiting to be perverted, and a deviant adult (deviant with regard to sexual norms . . . deviant or split with regard to himself) . . . Given that the child lives on in the adult, an adult faced with a child is particularly likely to be deviant and inclined to perform bungled or symbolic actions because he is involved in a relationship with his other self, with the other he once was. The child in front of him brings out the child within him . . . We have a “Traviata,” someone who has been led astray and seduced.34 In the seduction, the child trying to understand and to give an account of what is coming to him necessarily substitutes another meaning, another text for the original signifier. This process of translation accounts for primary repression in the child. Translation can only be partial, thus giving birth to the unconscious in the child: “the unconscious is the site of the untranslatable that is continually being presented and retranslated, that is de-traumatized.”35 But the unconscious of the child-receiver of the message necessarily contains the remainder of the unconscious of the other, the adult sending the message. Anybody in the position of the sender who is supposed to know more also conveys his/her repressed untranslatable in the message, what Laplanche calls “the child within.” Discourse always bears the traces of previous messages that are heterogeneous to the intended message. There is no language without a remainder, totally inassimilable and constantly retranslated and forever present like a gap in understanding. Enigmatic signifiers, like the secreted words of the phantom in Abraham’s theory “wreak havoc . . . in the coherence of logical progression” and “elude rationalization.”36 The text of fiction is a key example of a situation of communication in which seduction occurs: residues of messages from beyond the limits of the text can infiltrate its logic. The text has its “other,” untranslatable and phantomatic, because it is always the text of another than the one who writes. Michael Davis, in an analysis of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, sees the Gothic as a genre that thrives on the mechanism of enigmatic signifiers and seduces its readers into translating and mastering the traumatic messages that haunt the text. The Gothic, “Enlightenment’s dark internal foreign body”37, is “an excess of message”, “a stitching

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together of heterogeneous and thus profoundly enigmatic signifying materials” “deposited by the other and forced into us by the text.”38 The other within the text manifests itself in gaps and in all the jarring points where understanding is suspended. Like most Gothic texts, Villiers’ fantastic story L’Intersigne self-reflectively allegorizes the very secret transmission that constitutes the seduction at the heart of a communication situation. Rashkin provides a reading of the text following the line of Abraham’s phantom theory.39 She reconstructs a ghostly pre-narrative, the necessary complement of our narrative, which transports us to a generation previous to the story of our hero, into the secret of Maucombe, the priest our hero visits. The story line of Villiers’ tale is characteristic of nineteenth-century fantastic: Xavier de la V. entertains some Parisian guests with the eerie narrative of an episode of his life, when, in a spell of spleen, he decides to leave Paris. He finds refuge in the landscape of his childhood, in a secluded village of Brittany, where an old friend of the family, Maucombe, still lives. There, Xavier becomes the victim of bad dreams and visions, and is given a sense of the imminent death of his friend. He leaves in a hurry, only to learn, a week later, that Maucombe indeed had died in circumstances similar to those of his dreams. In Rashkin’s interpretation, Xavier’s narrative is “the tomb of Maucombe’s secret, the hidden resting place of his unspeakable drama.”40 Villiers’ short story is thus a ghost story, symptomatic of the presence of a phantom in the text. Another narrative inhabits the primary narrative, “a story about how a secret kept by the father concerning his child becomes a ghost within the child—a ghost that haunts but is never perceived.”41 Xavier’s story bears the traces of a phantomatic story of illegitimacy. Maucombe, according to Rashkin, is Xavier’s biological father. The secret lies in the complex play around a word which never becomes an open signifier in the text but which invades other words in the text in echoes, paronomasia and homophony. This word, a cryptonym, in Abraham’s terminology, is like a ghost inhabiting other signifiers.42 “Eau” (water) is the link that ties together in a paronomasia “Xavier de la V.” (“délavé” or “washed out” in French) and “de l’abbé” (from the priest). “Eau” is therefore the mysterious word that is never fully voiced and yet is eminently present in the text. “Eau” in “tombeau” drips in other words (tombe “eau” or “falling water”) such as Maucombe (in which Rashkin hears and reads “meau combe,” or “mots tombent,” “tomb-like words” or “falling words”). Maucombe is thus, for Rashkin, the parent who, in Matilda’s words in The Castle of Otranto, “lets fall a word and wishes it recalled.”43 As Maucombe gives Xavier his

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own coat, on the road, in the rain, he performs a sort of baptism. The gift of the coat is the baptism in which the hero receives his true name, and which frees the secret of the priest who then can die. L’Intersigne sets itself up, on the narrative level, as a text about secret transmission and spiritualism. Besides the presence of some words that stand out, unassimilable in the flow of meaning, literally embossed and raised above the surface meaning, words such as eau, Maucombe or manteau, the text also conveys lacunae, absences and aporias. As such, it is also typical of the communication situation described by Laplanche as primal seduction: “when a newborn is confronted with the adult world, the newborn, weak and waiting to be perverted is transmitted something he cannot assimilate, by a deviant adult.”44 The primal seduction or transmission is staged in L’Intersigne, as in so many texts from both the gothic and the fantastic traditions, by the framing device. Our narrator repeats the story narrated by Xavier who himself, in his story, receives a message from Maucombe. In other words, Xavier’s narrative lives a life of its own in our narrator and haunts him, forcing him to repeat a story that, in turn, requires the recipient. The text, in its display of transmitted stories, is a perfect example of the “multivoiced-ness of the Gothic.”45 It presents itself as possibly worked by foreign messages, as it lays the emphasis on the issue of narrative voice. Xavier performs his narrative task, motivated by the wish to “impress” his audience (694), rather than to express himself, that is to alleviate his conscience. To impress is to seduce and transmit, to change the weight of things and to convey more than communication requires. An impressive story is a story impressed on the mind of the listener, leaving a mark beyond his/her control. The mark in this case is materialized in the impressed narrative of the Parisian narratee, our imperceptibly traumatized narrator. The narrative voice requires an audience that will recall both the story of Xavier’s life and, somehow, the unconscious traces of the incommunicable message, impressed and pressed in, compressed by the effect of repression. Ross Chambers reads this tale as the figuration of the text’s own possibility.46 In his reading, the exchange of coats is the exchangeability of texts. Coats are texts and texture. The text asserts the value and necessity of its own doubleness as the agency of a narrative function (represented by “houppelande”, Xavier’s coat) and a textual function (the “manteau” of Maucombe). In this reading, the houppelande or cloak represents the mode of information and control of expression of the Parisian salons while the “manteau”, the coat, is characterized by its doubleness: it is thin and worn, yet able to exert a secret force. The “text” then is seen

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as a contradictory mode of expression to the “narrative.” The “text” is what cannot be shrugged off easily once one gets into it. Its texture is a web of “unknown and horrible syllables” and “sad screams” (707). It conveys a “second sensation” and its message therefore is not what it seems to be. The coat and the cloak are locked in an interface, which reveals two worlds and two modes of discourse. The uncanny emerges from this interface: a gesture or a word can turn out to be double and carry a secret weight. The change of coats therefore points to what happens in communication: it is symptomatic of an exchange of words. Nothing seems to have been conveyed in the linguistic exchange between Maucombe and Xavier, and yet, this exchange changes everything. The coat in its doubleness figures as an enigmatic signifier: Maucombe puts it on Xavier’s shoulders in a gesture of protection and in response to the cold rain. Yet the gesture signifies more than Xavier can understand, and in that respect, Xavier is “seduced.” On the deserted road, Xavier is passive and Maucombe active, and the exchange is unilateral since Maucombe controls the situation. Throughout the story, Xavier is presented as a newborn child, as we can see for instance in the epigraph from Saint Bernard’s Meditations: Hear o man, what you were before you were born and what you will be until death. Truly there was a time when you did not exist. Then, made of vile material, nourished in your mother’s womb from menstrual blood, your garment was inferior hide. Next, wrapped in the vilest rag, you came out to us—thus clothed and adorned! And you do not remember what your origin is. Man is nothing but fetid sperm. (694) The coat, like the first hide and the vile rag, is a reminder of the total deprivation of the newborn. Xavier’s story is the story of human dependence and frailty. The coat is thin and worn-out and given to the child by a paternal figure. It is his human inheritance. Xavier is born into the world, shivering and nearly naked. Man is always born “premature,” incomplete and unfinished, that is poorly adapted to his environment. The image recurs at the beginning of our text when Xavier describes himself as a fragile embryo, born and yet still unborn, unable to cope with the flow of things and with an incomplete self-image. He is lighting a cigar at the tapers near the mirror when he sees his deadly pallor: “and [he] buried [himself] in a huge chair, an old dark-red velvety piece

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of faded furniture in which the flight of time . . . seemed less heavy to [him]” (695). In the French text, the old chair is “capitonné,” literally lined in red velvet. “Capitonné” also brings up the word “cape,” cloak, the first coat that shrouds him when he gets to Brittany. The cloak is the first garb, the one the immature child will have to exchange for the coat of experience, the coat of human exchanges that Maucombe puts on his frail shoulders. But, like any other child, Xavier is not yet ready for the exchange and the communication. He is a mere infant, unable to speak or understand complex human speech as the alliterative French text suggests at this point: “et je m’ensevelis dans un ample fauteuil, vieux meuble en velours grenat capitonné où le vol des heures me semble moins lourd” (“and I buried myself in a huge chair, an old dark-red velvety piece of faded furniture in which the flight of time . . . seemed less heavy to me” (695)). In the series of consonants “f,” “v,” “m,” language becomes murmur and rhythm, like a lullaby. This fragile being, the embodiment of human frailty then calls for help: “father Maucombe, I called in low tones” (695). Xavier is searching for a “face that could help him with his humanity” (695). The call for help is answered by the parental figure who indeed provides sustaining comfort: Xavier is fed, put to bed, fed again at breakfast, and Maucombe walks beside him along the road of life. But the call of help is answered beyond the need. As a result, Xavier represses the incomprehensible message he receives from Maucombe together with the gestures of care. Thus, he tries to close and lock the door, to shut off the world of father Maucombe, “sournoisement” (sour-noise-ment) that is, in English “stealthily” and noiselessly, as if to remain deaf or in French “sourd” to the noise he cannot fully decipher (696). But doors keep opening. In the same way, Xavier represses the dream that invades him, tries to “forget the night” (704), then forgets to narrate the events of the night to Maucombe (704), and finally forgets to promise he will come back to Saint Maur. Xavier represses the trauma that the scene carried or maybe a trauma from another time that is reechoed in this scene and translated into a series of ambiguous signifiers. The episode of Saint Maur cannot be dated, as if it could not be symbolized. Time is crumpled up in a series of sensations that precisely annihilate the heaviness of “the flight of time.” Time is nighttime, that is to say time beyond measure. Nanon welcomes our hero with a candle in her hand. The hotel where he forgets his cloak is called “Soleil d’or” (“golden sun” or could it be soleil dort, sleeping sun?). Maucombe wants to give him “la lumière des siècles,” the light of past centuries, and it is

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the eerie light of a candle that wakes him up in the dead of the night. Chronological time turns into mere repetition as one hour recurs, excluding every other: nine o’clock is the time of his sudden departure from Paris, from Saint Maur and the time of his return to Paris. It is the time of the fit of spleen or “abattement” (dejection) (709). This “abattement” strangely brings in echoes of the “battement d’ailes” (flapping of wings) that Xavier hears constantly in Saint Maur. The flapping wings in turn bring forth the image of Nanon’s Breton headdress. She is a swift messenger, like a dove, and all messages go through her: she gives and sends letters and even polishes letters at the threshold of the house: “I saw,” says Xavier, “that the gray flagstones had just been polished and that traces of carved letters were still perceptible” (698). The flapping wings of Nanon are thus associated with writing, but also with cryptic messages: the “white-tailed eagle’s shrieks” in the story are “horrible syllables” and the owl’s scream are frightening (702). The flapping of the wings betrays the mark of enigmatic transmissions. Like the inscription on the threshold, the message can be polished, clean and acceptable, yet an element of ancient fear remains. Another word insists and recurs in different forms in Xavier’s narrative: the word “pressé.” The letter he receives is “pressée,” that is urgent. He journeys on an “express” train, and the characters are described as “voyageurs pressés” (in a hurry). The coat is heavy on his shoulder, as if it were weighing him down (“presser” also means “to squeeze” and “weigh down” like a secret). The memory of the visit to Maucombe therefore seems to condense other scenes, brought back in verbal echoes and homophones. Translated after the events and retranslated in the narrative, the scene might not in fact stage a coincidence (the intersign) that takes Xavier by surprise. It conveys not so much the image of future death but rather the obscure memory trace of an earlier enigma. Maucombe, Saint Maur and Nanon are the catalysts that bring back an infantile trauma. As night fell, the call for help of a child, young Xavier, was answered beyond expectation, with an incomprehensible message, by a figure who used to wrap him warmly and send him back to sleep, just as Maucombe did, at nightfall, on the deserted road: “he threw the coat on my shoulders and buttoned it up, looking tender and worried, while drained of my strength, I closed my eyes” (707). The scene on the road simply awakens the obscure memory of the other opaque moments of communication in which a child is given more than he can grasp by the parental figure bent over his crib. These moments are repressed, translated or distorted, so as to be processed by the subject.

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Enigmatic signifiers represent the excess that cannot figure in the interplay between need and satisfaction. Their mysterious messages haunt the subject and initiate the process of repression. What Xavier discovers in Saint Maur had been in him all along, in the memory of the child he was. What is opaquely revealed in the story is that the unconscious of the hero is partly made of elements from the unconscious of this other figure that used to come in the night to answer the call. Although Laplanche never says that the unconscious of the child is made of the unconscious of the mother, enigmatic signifiers clearly demonstrate that there is no stable language and no bilateral communication. Signifiers carry the weight of the unconscious even as they express obvious meanings. In Laplanche and Leclaire’s famous article “The Unconscious,” which was the object of a bitter controversy between the authors and Lacan, the hypothesis of the presence of the other’s unconscious in the unconscious of the subject is already evident.47 The subject is haunted by remainders of the message of the other, messages that become part of his unconscious makeup because they cannot be fully deciphered, neither by the sender nor by the receiver. Laplanche and Leclaire present the case of a patient’s dream: Philippe dreams of a fountain with a unicorn on a square. This dream serves to point out the discrepancy between need and desire and the opaqueness of some signifiers that cannot be properly processed. In the gap between Philippe’s need to drink and his desire to drink an opaque zone is situated. It is in excess of the satisfaction of the need. The need to drink is the primary motor of the dream. Yet the dream gradually unburies a complex memory. “J’ai soif” (I am thirsty) is associated in the patient’s mind not only with the square (“place,” in French), but also with a beach (“plage,” in French) and more precisely with the five-year-old Philippe complaining that he is thirsty. Lili, the aunt of the boy makes fun of his self-centeredness, calling him “moi-je” and repeating over and over again, like a mock litany, “Philippe, j’ai soif.” Lili is the mysterious figure behind the unicorn (“licorne” in French) in the fountain in the dream. The dream, collapsing “moi-je,” “plage” and “j’ai soif,” clearly shows how the moment of entry into the symbolic, when one says “I” (“je” in French) and becomes the subject of the utterance, is haunted by traces of another drama. “J’ai soif” is the symbol of individuation and subjectivity for the subject. “I” exist because I say “I,” “I am Philippe.” But the formula corresponds both to the promise of the abolition of tension and to the postponement of the satisfaction. “I” am only a subject in language. At another level, the sentence becomes enigmatic and carries not so much

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the seeds of its own impossibility as the mark of its foreign origin: all sentences are potentially inhabited by foreign messages and thus never originate in the subject. Voicing his need, the subject, Philippe, also voices the desire of someone else: “Philippe, j’ai soif” (Philippe, I am thirsty). The need of the child is answered by the mockery of the aunt. Only her husband called Aunt Lili Lili. “Philippe, j’ai soif” is therefore more than Lili’s response to the child’s needs. It is the secret formulation of her own thirst or desire for her husband.48 “J’ai soif” is a signifier that comes from the other, from Lili. Philippe’s thirst is not a simple need to drink. It becomes a fantasy in which need turns into desire. Lili inhabits this fantasy. She is an object of sexual desire for the child. The shift from need to sexual desire was provoked by Lili who, responding to the need of a child, expressed the desire of a woman for her husband and thus seduced the child into the adult world of sexual innuendoes. Psychic life can be transmitted between generations, in the form of phantoms or unstated secrets or in the form of enigmatic signifiers. In the language of the subject, there lurk the unspoken words of another. Language is in essence Gothic. The sins of the fathers always return to haunt the words and actions of their children. But other ghosts haunt writing. The dead that return are not simply unwanted ancestors. Surreptitiously, the world, the body and the real also return from their improper burial and unacceptable substitution by signs in language.

2 Discourse and Its Other: The Figural and the Real

The words of the text, in their silence are but divining rods to disclose other words, perhaps words of the other. —Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text, 142 Reading mostly catches the noise of words, not the sound of their silence. It catches their meaning, not the way they drift, unless reading becomes lending an ear to the eyes, for as Hartman reminds us, “reading, especially in print culture is often used to blind the ear” (142). In the silence of the words lies their haunting power. Reading for haunting requires a different type of approach to reading. The flat surface of the written page must be hollowed out to become a chamber of echoes, a womb for sounds as they travel through layers of time and through the memory of what words have erased in order to signify: the world, the body and the density of matter. In a culture of the written page, how can we have access to the “words of the other,” to what ordinary communication and signification leave behind? Reading for haunting is reading for the remainder.

The Real in language Remainder n. 1. a part or portion that is left, as after use, subtraction, expenditure, the passage of time, etc. . . . 2. Maths. a. the amount left over when one quantity cannot be exactly divided by another . . . b. another name for difference. 3. Property law. A future interest in a property; an interest in a particular estate that will pass to one at future date, as on the death of the current possessor. 4. a number of copies of a book left unsold when the demand slows or ceases, which are sold at reduced price by the publisher.1 33

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The remainder has to do with inheritance: it is that which “will pass to one at some future date, as on the death of the current possessor.” It is that which is transmitted to the subject and yet does not quite belong to him/her. In communication, it is what exceeds meaning. The remainder is that which, in The Castle of Otranto, made it impossible to “lock” meaning in the word “spring.” It is also the weight that lies behind the non-verbal gestures in L’Intersigne, and turns communication or the exchange between the two main characters into an imposition, an impressive text, thin and yet unbearably heavy, like Maucombe’s coat. The remainder therefore haunts the text. It has to do with the return of the dead and their legacy to the living. Žižek, in Looking Awry reminds us of the inextricable connection between symbolization and haunting. There is no symbolization without a return of the dead: “it is commonplace to state that symbolization as such equates to symbolic murder: When we speak about a thing, we suspend, place in parenthesis its reality.”2 But this “reality” comes back to haunt the very word that excluded it. As Mladen Dolar writes, “the law offers words instead of things, it guarantees the objective world instead of the object. This is the only way it is possible for the subject to deal with the loss, although this operation produces a remainder which will come to haunt reality as it is instituted.”3 This return of the dead betrays the aporia at the heart of the act of symbolization: the thing is not completely rendered into words and not completely deadened in the process of symbolization. It remains improperly buried. “A certain symbolic debt persists beyond physical expiration.”4 If the objective world is never the object, something of the object lurks around, like a spectral presence in the representation of the world. The remainder is therefore the something that cannot be put into words but is present in all symbolic exchanges. For Xavier in L’Intersigne, that something takes the form of a fit of spleen (709). Despondency and ill being resist inclusion in the symbolic system represented by the Parisian salons. In the superficial exchanges, they stand out with the heaviness and the materiality of a forgotten world of things and sensations, such as “battement d’ailes,” the dense and intense noise of flapping wings. Like a “divining rod” to go back to Hartman’s expression in the epigram, the silence of “abattement” (dejection) discloses the world of flapping wings (“battements d’ailes”). Despondency (“abattement” in French) returns, betraying imperceptibly the ineffable emergence of the death drive and a subtle drift back to the absolute rest of inorganic chaos, at the very heart of Parisian culture and teeming and noisy life. Spleen is the moment of suspension before the expression of desire. If the symbolic is the world

Discourse and Its Other 35

of loss and compromise, of distantiation and desire, it is a world built on the repression of the death drive. But repression is not suppression. The remainder is situated precisely at this point of inadequacy between repression and suppression. As one becomes a subject in language, one takes possession of one’s inheritance: we all inherit symbolic constructions and their ghosts, all the living dead folded in the creases of language, as so many leftovers that are not quite part of the system but are nonetheless the very foundations of all linguistic exchanges. For Žižek, the return of the dead, or the remainder, corresponds in fact to the return of the Real of Lacanian terminology. The Real functions as a dark specter behind reality, always there, ready to spread, like a “gray formless mist, pushing slowly as if with an inchoate life.”5 Žižek evokes the famous painting by Malevich, The Naked Unframed Icon of My Time, as an illustration of the relationship between reality and the Real: reality is the white background, the open space in which objects can appear. In the center, there is “a black hole.” The black mass gives the white background its consistency but also its fragility. It is a realm of darkness that could overflow the whole field of white. It is the Real. But the painting masters the Real, turns it into an object: the black hole is shaped into a black square that fits in the spatial grid established by the white background. The Real is the menace that all our symbolic constructions try to keep at bay. Sometimes, one can see how reality is submerged by the Real. This is the case, Žižek writes, of Rothko’s paintings, where gradually, in time, the background is overflowed by the gray or black mass of the black hole, leaving no room for a background on which figures could appear.6 The Real returns at the most awkward times both “as an irruption of the unexpected and with clockwork precision.”7 In L’Intersigne, nine o’clock marks the irruption of the Real in reality, and the dysfunction of the system of protection of reality: mechanical time hides its ghost. Nine o’clock looms up in Xavier’s well-regulated life as an unexpected and inevitable moment when things come to a halt and when the subject is submerged by a sense of lack to the point of inertia. Nine o’clock indicates a default in the symbolic system for the protagonist. Such a moment of oscillation between emptiness and fullness appears in Frankenstein for instance, and more precisely, in the scene of the creation of the monster, which is representative of the failure of symbolic constructions. As a construction, the monster epitomizes the Symbolic, that is to say the building up of a grid to make sense of life and give coherence to the inarticulate and the disparate, but as a construction the monster is also the evidence that order is imposed a posteriori.

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Emerging as an effect of the Symbolic and against the Symbolic, the monster is typical of the relationship between the Real and the Symbolic: the Real cannot exist without the Symbolic that sustains it and yet cannot be absorbed and reintegrated in the Symbolic that it comes to disturb. The monster opens his eye, thus becoming the Thing that looks back at the subject, and as a consequence, nullifies him. The monster is “the opening of a hole in reality, which is also that which comes to fill it with an unbearable presence, with a being more being than being, vacuum and plenitude all in one, the plenitude as a direct consequence of the emptiness.”8 The monster, as he becomes the gaze that undoes the subject, opens up a non-place in the system of creation. Like Dracula who cannot be reflected in a mirror and therefore does not have a double, the monster in Frankenstein is unique, one of a kind. As such he is the closest we ever get to the Real. The Real is singular and unique. Clément Rosset calls it “idiot,” in the Greek sense of “idios”: “private,” “own” and without a double. Because it is unique, the Real cannot find a place in language except by accident or by chance. Language is bound to exclude the Real because by nature language and symbolization impose reality as a substitute and a world of doubles on the world of things. The world of signs doubles up on the world of things. Indeed as Rosset reminds us, there are two forms of contact with the Real: “a rough contact, when we bump into things and only get a sense of their silent presence,” or “a smooth contact,” a polished contact, as in a mirror, “which replaces the presence of things by their reflected apparition.”9 The rough contact is a contact without double, the smooth contact corresponds to an approximation only, through the mirrored double, through the world of images, and symbolic constructions. To speak the Real therefore is to avoid the Real by turning its unrepresentability into an image, a concept or an approximation. This corresponds to a smooth approach, rather than an encounter. The fantastic, on the other hand, feeds on the intuition that the real escapes the grip of signification, and its function then, might in fact be to provoke sudden encounters with the Real, rough moments of contact when reality vacillates and is destabilized in an impossible situation. Any attempt to inscribe the Real in language results in its reabsorption in the Symbolic, except when the inscription avoids the straightforward channels of signification and communication. A word out of place, a word out of time, a being out of place (like a monster) or out of time (like a vampire or a ghost) provoke the unexpected gaping of the Symbolic where the Real, like a gash, comes to find a mode of expression rather than a signification.

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In language, the system is regularly threatened by inherent chaos. There are in language elements that are not intended to make sense and are not part of the construct of reality. Their presence is gratuitous and often disturbing. Their relationship to language is comparable to that of the black hole and the white background in Malevich’s painting. These elements are on the side of chaos and do not fit in the grid and yet require the grid to appear. They are of the essence of the poetic in language, when “language speaks,” Lecercle explains, that is to say, when the subject loses ground in language.10 In essence, the fantastic is an aspect of the poetic, this destabilizing force at the heart of the Symbolic system. We always think that “I speak language” is the only possibility, and yet, sometimes, our certainties collapse and the system appears in its emptiness. Language is more than the constitution of reality in the symbolic order. It has a life of its own: “it proliferates in apparent and sometimes violent chaos.”11 No grammar rules take into consideration this violent chaos. It is not formalized. Lecercle’s definition of the remainder develops in part from the Lacanian concept of lalangue. Lalangue appears in language in a manner similar to what Žižek calls the return of the Real in the Symbolic. Language is the necessary background for lalangue which would be the black hole, the abyss where meaning and logic collapse. As Lecercle explains, “Lalangue is the absence in any given text, of coherent structures: those which the linguist analyzes, but also those which he rejects (anagrams, homophonic relationships, tropes). It is the pattern of points where the system fails, and at these points, the subject appears in the text.”12 The very term lalangue speaks for its object and is emblematic of its referent: “the word seems to lie outside langue and yet be part of it.”13 Lalangue looks like a common French noun and yet does not require an article. It is not a proper name because it does have a meaning and not just a reference. It is not la langue either. The term itself exemplifies the mechanism at work in language. Its homophonic ambiguity shows that it is the point of anchoring of the unconscious where it haunts language. Lalangue is the potential dark double of “langue” that emerges in close and indistinguishable connection with “langue.” It is unruly and yet not completely different from langue. It is the same and yet other. Language, as a construction, attempts to reduce equivocation and tries to set rules rather than allow the proliferation of irregularities. It channels misunderstanding into limpid communication based on clear-cut oppositions. The rule of opposition of phonemes that are defined by what they are not is typical of the general pattern. But the undead always return: homonymy, homophony, paronomasias and their horde of demons of chaos haunt the clear-cut divide. Did Walpole

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mean “a princess’ shade” or “a prince’s shade”? Does the confusion reveal anything of the unconscious of the speaker or of that of the listener or that of language? Every utterance hides a potential slippage back into the overflowing gray mist of indistinctiveness one tries so hard to control. The abject materiality of language, the obscure mud from which the crystal of our most rewarding limpid communications is extracted, always come back to haunt. Language then ceases to be effective and becomes affective: “Philippe, j’ai soif,” (I am thirsty) Aunt Lili said. Language teems with alternate meanings, misunderstandings, lapses and innuendoes. Otranto resounds with a prophecy, which, in between the lines, reveals the unintentional: “where’re a casque that suits this sword is found. [. . .] / Alphonso’s blood can save the maid, / And quiet a longrestless prince’s shade.” In Les noms indistincts, Milner explores lalangue further as the haunting and troubling emergence of the Real that no system can ever completely eliminate: Its most immediate symptom is impossibility. However many the formulations (literally eccentric to what is represented or made distinct in them), there always remains something that is not being said. Words fail, one would say, thus pointing to the symptom of the Real in the shape of a lack. But one should add that something also is said in excess, something that was not required (it was required of that something that it remained unsaid).14 The Real is the impossible. It is lack and excess at the same time. Lalangue is its symptom. It is the place in language “from which one speaks of what can never be spoken.”15 In “Fragments de la langue d’avant Babel,”16 Serge Leclaire gives a perfect example of the way lalangue functions and yet does not work within the frame of language while, at the same time, it conveys more than any linguistic structure can. In one of his patient’s dreams, a phrase recurs and insists, although it remains untranslatable in any known language: “guet libus ombres.” “Guet libus” sounds somewhat like a German phrase, “gut lieben,” to love. “Ombres” could be Spanish for men or French for shadows. But even though the analyst reabsorbs the phrase in the grid of European languages and proposes an interpretation within the system according to which the patient would be expressing homosexual desire, Laurent, the patient, remains dissatisfied and haunted by the phrase. “Libus” in particular, as Leclaire notices, insists. “Libus” is Laurent’s enigma. Its insistence reaches into the deepest

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zones of Laurent’s psyche. “Libus” is a locus of pleasure, a word that is not a word, but is rhythm. “Guet libus” is a perfect dactyl, followed by a spondee “ombres.” The phrase is expected to make sense, even in an indirect and sinuous way. But instead, it puts forth no concept. It is literally pieces of a body in jubilation: a dactyl, that is a “toe” or “finger,” and a spondee, that is music and libation. All this forms a “foot.” The pieces of the body in revelry liberate language from its gangue and coating of meaning. In the chaos of a phrase that does not make sense, another place appears, a non-place where contradictions do not matter. This other place is the body. Leclaire calls this non-place from which the body speaks language “our ‘heimlich’ that the rational exile in which we live makes us feel as ‘unheimlich.’”17 The body is the great unspoken that sometimes will wake up from the dead and reinhabit the shucks of language from which it was discarded. A line is a foot and a foot is a sum of toes. Laurent offers a line to the divinity of the body, a line that returns, on “the other scene,” where concepts do not matter as much as matter itself. This example in which the remainder of language takes the consistency of the body should not lead to nostalgic dreams of a return to a Pre-Babel world. The remainder is inherent in language and does not precede or succeed it. Between lalangue and langue, there can only be interplay or a symbiosis similar to that of a parasite and its host: each exists only in relation to the other. In the same way as enigmatic signifiers are conveyed only in the midst and the flow of a communication situation, or in the same way as phantoms are revealed in the very words that hide them, lalangue is the phonatory impulse inherent in all logical articulation. A study of haunted writing therefore throws light onto the jarring elements within language in order to account for the unsaid of an utterance and to reinstate the excommunicated in communication.

Corporeality in language A line is a foot and a foot is made of dactyls or toes. In language one should also therefore perceive the articulating body and the disarticulated body. Language undoes the body and turns it into signs. But of the undone body there must remain some traces. Language can never be the transparent medium linguists describe. It is by nature haunted by all it must leave aside, unsaid and unsayable, in order to constitute itself as system. Haunting is inherent in the very nature and working of language. Yet, a thin line divides haunted language, our language, from a completely dysfunctioning language. In schizophrenic language

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for example, haunting ceases to operate as language ceases to function. The body in that case is not the shadow that will speak through, unexpected, in the gaps of discourse. It becomes an alternative mode of not saying. Deleuze presents a radical theory of the articulating body in an analysis of linguistic disorder and the language of schizophrenics.18 In this piece, he compares the “esoteric words,” portmanteau words and nonsense of Carroll and Artaud. Deleuze distinguishes surface meaning (the superficial distortions of Carroll remain skin deep and playful perversion) from depth language (a term reserved for schizophrenic language as the expression of the fragmented, dissociated body). The values of depth language are not written but are purely tonic. It all takes place at the surface. The fundamental experience in schizophrenic language is the collapse of meaning as a mechanical process not dissimilar to the erasure of a disk: all the functions are in place but the disk remains unreadable: In the breakdown of surface, all words lose their meaning. They may retain a certain power of designation, but one which is experienced as empty; a certain power of manifestation, but experienced as indifferent; a certain signification, but experienced as “false.” In other words, words lose their power to set down or express incorporeal effects distinct from the body’s actions and passions. All the words become physical and affect the body immediately.19 The language of the schizophrenic is hardly language any more. Schizophrenia marks a failure of the Symbolic as the realm of substitution: the word has become the thing rather than a representation of the thing. For instance, sounds “are confused with the sonorous qualities of things, with the noisiness of bodies, with their actions and passions, and with their so called oral and anal determinations.”20 Now, as Deleuze explains, “what makes language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies, organizes them into propositions and makes them available to assume an expressive function.”21 Language exists only as long as the line between things and propositions is maintained. But the “language affect” of the schizophrenic literally annihilates the “language effect” of standard communication. It “decomposes all fixed, written words into alimentary and excremental fragments.”22 Far away from the glassy surface of transparent communication, the schizophrenic articulates his body into words rather than using words to represent his body: “what escaped from my spleen or my liver was in the shape of letters from a very ancient and mysterious alphabet

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chewed by an enormous mouth,” Artaud wrote.23 When the body takes over, words become “passion words which explode in wounding phonetic values” or “action words which weld together inarticulated tonic values.”24 Deleuze describes this anti-language in the example of Wolfson, the author of Le schizo et les langues, in which he recounts all the devices he developed to counteract the inevitable use of English as a language of communication.25 English is his mother tongue and mother’s tongue. As such it is a source of intense pain because it is the language of the abject, the alimentary and the excremental. It is the language of the chewing mouth. In order to protect himself from the physicality of the mother tongue, Wolfson resorts to “instant translations”: he treats words as chunks of sounds, cuts them into syllables or reduces them to their essential consonants and translates these minimal components into foreign languages: French, German or Russian. Words are turned into matter, and meaning is discarded. For Wolfson, “Vegetable shortening,” for instance, is deprived of its communicative function, of its power of designation and of its signification and turned into “végétal-schmelz-jis-ung.” “Vegetable” becomes the French “végétal,” then shortening becomes “she” which is translated into the Hebrew “chemenn” or the German “schmelz” and “or” becomes “jis” (Russian), while “ing” is turned into the German “ung.” Wolfson’s plight is that speaking for him has collapsed into eating. Even his words are fragments of a body he cannot escape through the safety device of a wellregulated system of communication. Wolfson, unable to use language, as a consequence also starves himself as if to purify himself of the abject, or suddenly rushes to the refrigerator and swallows everything as fast as possible, mumbling foreign words as if to drown the noise of his eating/speaking mouth behind the sounds of hypothetical words. Wolfson never entered the Symbolic, never accepted that the words of the other were not the other. His plight illustrates the most extreme drift of melancholy as refusal to let go of the lost object, and primarily of the mother who is the first and only object of desire. He never accepted the compromise required of all speaking subjects that they separate from the body of the mother of infancy (in total fusion with the not-yet clearly delineated subject), and substitute words for pieces of the mother. Wolfson’s linguistic delirium strangely echoes in part the intense bodily tortures, entirely induced by internal voices that Perceval, a psychotic Victorian patient, narrates. Perceval’s narrative was rediscovered by Bateson and published in 1974.26 This narrative often reads as

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one of the purest examples of Gothic fiction ever produced, with its paraphernalia of straitjackets, villains and confining spaces. It seems to fit the description of the Gothic as the “supernatural explained” in the Radcliffean sense of the term: all voices and visions will ultimately receive rational explanations. Perceval finds the key that unlocks his own psychosis: his problem was simply that he took language literally. His psychosis is characterized by a failure of symbolization. Language fails to operate as a system in which the distance between the thing and the word is the very warranty of the possibility to represent the thing. The lunatic, as Perceval comes to realize, “mistakes a poetic train of thought for the reality.” When told to “wrestle with his keeper,” he “seizes him by the waistcoat” whereas he was only “meant to expostulate and remonstrate with him.”27 The way the materiality of language comes to dominate to the point of canceling its communicative power is clearly demonstrated in the account of the physical pain that Perceval undergoes when he speaks or when the internal voices speak in his body. He “feel[s] the pain in the nerves of [his] palate and throat on speaking.”28 He has to “expectorate violently in order to get rid of his two formidable enemies,” namely his internal voices and the incoherent and yet compulsive commands that inhabit his mind.29 Like Wolfson, Perceval refuses food for fear he might choke on any form of nourishment. But the voices are “literally crammed down [his] gullet, bringing back the end of the spoon with blood on it and chipping one of [his] teeth.”30 Skin deep, language wounds the body and is the body. Skin is the place of the interface between the “I” and the “not-I” before the separation imposed by culture or forced by nature. The skin is the envelope that allows the infant to delineate a primary sense of self. But for Perceval, this intermediary phase of his development has clearly been lacking, triggering psychosis. As we will see with Victor Frankenstein (Chapter 4) or Martin the protagonist of Proof (Chapter 6), the gothic world of melancholy is inhabited by subjects who have not successfully abjected the “skin mother” of infancy and have therefore a very literal relationship with language. Perceval’s psychosis is a desperate descent into the inferno of physical pain. He explores to the core the words coming from the body. These words speak of the family, religion and the psychiatric institution only in the form of deep physical violence. Perceval’s “narrative” however becomes possible when the memory of the wounds only, and not the actual wounds, come to haunt the words that describe them. The condition for recounting the madness of language is that language recover its glassy surface, its artificial smoothness and thus also its ghostly abysmal possibilities.

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Onuphrius and literal language Without conflating the mental processes of schizophrenia and certain tendencies of literary or artistic language to disruption, one could certainly read the fantastic tradition as a deliberate sliding beneath the surface of words. The fantastic is literature that uses the madness of language rather than the language of madness to point to the blind spot at the heart of symbolization in a self-critical mode. The untenable position of the fantastic discourse is that it must be at the same time a discourse and an anti-discourse. It must convey in the system of communication that which by definition is outside of the system, unreachable: the very moment when the system of communication, the grid, collapses under the pressure of the unsayable. The following quote by Artaud, whose name is after all closely related to The Monk by Lewis, seems programmatic of the “literature of unreason” where “language is an instrument of madness, of the uprooting of thought, of revolt, a labyrinth of unreason, not a dictionary into which the pedants who dwell on the banks of the Seine direct their mental contractions.”31 Onuphrius, a fantastic tale by Gautier for instance, shows how literary texts reveal the interplay in language of language and its other. The tale is presented as the medical account, or case study of the gradual alienation of Onuphrius, a painter and a poet, into madness. It all starts with a mistake: a slash, a gash, an involuntary gesture on the smooth surface of the canvas. This of course corresponds, in the fantastic, to an encounter with the Real, which always appears, literally, as a contretemps. Onuphrius is applying the finishing touch to his masterpiece: the portrait of his girlfriend Jacintha. But suddenly his brushes turns “stiff,” the hand shifts, the paint lands on the nose rather than the pupil of the eye. Trying to erase the mistake, the painter changes the expression of the nose and spoils the painted smile with a pair of rather virile mustaches. A deviance of the hand makes representation impossible and turns the dream of realistic rendering into a joke, a “phallophany,” that is, the apparition of a phallus totally outside the scope of symbolic mediation. At first, “the blood had started to flow under the flesh,” under the surface (27). The painter could give an exact equivalent to life in art. But suddenly, the clumsy gesture reverses the process: the touch of white applied on the black pupil of the inanimate painted figure “like a drop of dew at the tip of the needle” (28) acts like the Lacanian gaze. It animates the inanimate painting and destabilizes Onuphrius who is no longer a masterful subject. Onuphrius is left with the black hole of the Real that returns behind all grid and undoes representation. As long

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as the drop of white dew shimmers at the tip of his brush, he remains in the Symbolic. But as the gesture finally reaches its destination on the canvas, Onuphrius falls from his stool, loses the object of his desire and his sense of reality. No longer a subject in control of his medium, he slides under the surface of the painting, becomes paint or brush. The bristles of a thousand brushes (49) pierce his skin, and each stroke is like a gash on his tortured body, flayed alive and torn to pieces. The white dot returns obsessively, in different forms at different moments of the story. It functions like a ghost that comes to haunt the artist at the most unexpected moments. The house of M de *** for instance is a white shape among the grove of dark chestnut trees, a shape the painter cannot reach. The interplay of black and white is also replayed in the game of draught where Onuphrius plays the whites. It reappears in the shape of the endless white carpet unrolled under his feet all night long by the evil spirits that will not let him go back home. All of these scenes reenact the loss of the Symbolic for the hero and the crisis of the subject. Onuphrius dies and is buried alive in a white shroud, another analog of the dot. The drop of white “at the tip of the needle” penetrates his body lying in the darkness of the coffin. It is neither in him nor outside, neither paint nor body. Surface and depth are confused. Effect becomes affect. Onuphrius does not know any longer whether he is afraid of dying of hunger or of being devoured by worms. In order to calm his fears and recover a sense of order, he starts composing lines. But in French, lines and worms are homonyms: “vers,” worms or lines, take us irremediably on the “other side of language,” towards the remainder that language does not control. Composition can hardly hide its dark double: decomposition. Onuphrius falls into primitive oral depth. Devoured by worms, he produces lines. His language is his body. This language is actually reduced to a scream in the following scene, when the painter is squashed and squeezed between two brushes, paintbrushes no doubt, by his former hero, M. de Berbiquier de Terre Neuve du Thym. If Onuphrius has become paint, Berbiquier is not so much the painter as the painting itself. His physical description makes of him an analog of the gesture that went wrong: “a little transversal slash . . . buried under a multitude of folds and hairs as stiff as bristles, represented more or less what one could call a mouth, for lack of a better term” (49). Berbequier’s mouth as a slash is the stroke that missed its target on the canvas when the painter tried to put life into the pupils of the portrait of his lover. The signifiers, pictorial and linguistic, become purely material and take on a life of their own. The medium takes on the life of the object

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it was supposed to represent. The surface of the canvas and the page are no longer distinguished from the abyss of the body of the artist. Onuphrius’ soul is crushed by painting brushes and his poetry is his mouth absorbing and disgorging insipid matter. Madness for him, as for Perceval or Wolfson, is a collapse of the notion of transparent medium, of the thin line that “separates thing from proposition” in Deleuze’s phrase.32 In Onuphrius, “speaking collapses into eating,” and poetic language fails to grant the hero his status as full subject. The poet’s lines are emptied of meaning and he is forced to swallow and regurgitate an odious mixture of sickening sounds. Who talks then? Is it language or is it Onuphrius? Language speaks of its own accord and beyond any rules. And it speaks in the demented body, like a huge chewing mouth. But in the fantastic, the moment of the madness of language is rapidly overcome and a sense of reality regained. Narrative control is nevertheless reestablished in the last paragraph of the text: somebody speaks language. A narrator addresses the reader with a trivial question: “isn’t the ending very well-known for an extraordinary story?” (62). Madness is then only something that happens on the other side of language, when the system fails.

Non-discursive forces at work in discourse: “The Figural” (Lyotard) Onuphrius questions representation as the place where the world and the subject can be structured. It brings to the fore forces of resistance and opacity in language and highlights the atomisation of the subject. The subject can no longer be separated from his language. He is spoken as well as speaking, painted as well as painting. Death haunts all of his attempts at meaning, like the worms of the grave that haunt his poetic lines. The artist’s delirium is the impossible of language, what happens below the line that separates propositions and things, when lalangue takes over langue and the Real over the Symbolic. Delirium is, properly speaking, aberrant because it literally causes meaning to wander, reintroducing in discourse precisely what discourse discarded in order to constitute itself, namely the articulating body. As Bellemin-Noël writes, “delirium is the mark of the irruption of the figural in discourse.” It promotes “a radical difference between what it designates and what it intended to signify.”33 The force of designation in language warps the power of signification. Opaque, dense matter and bodies appear where only signs were expected.

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That there is a dimension of force that escapes the logic of the signifier is precisely the claim Lyotard makes in Discours, Figure.34 The text was born in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1968 as a direct reflection on its emergence and failure. How indeed could one account for a revolution in a world in which the imperialism of the signifier and of Kantian models triumphs so totally, if not by acknowledging that there is something outside signification and beside discourse? Lyotard then proceeds to unearth the visual in our culture, which gives pride of place to writing. The inexplicable emergence of chaos at a moment when order triumphs so completely, as around the time of social unrest in the late 1960s, brings to mind another period of revolution, precisely at the acme of scientific rationality and at the epitome of the Kantian establishment of transcendental subjectivity: the late eighteenth century and the French Revolution which triggered a wave of Gothic fiction and a trend of fantastic tales. It seems that transparency and certainty carry their opposite within their own limits. There is no subject without his abject and no system without its shadows. Discours, Figure is a study of “the other” of discourse and of the forces of disruption that shake its foundations and yet are indistinguishable from the foundations. It is another attempt to “look awry” at our discursive practices. Its object of contention is the omnipotence of the signifier in our culture, and what such domination conceals. Lyotard defines “the figural” as the other of language occulted by the signifier. The meaning of this central notion, the “figural,” in fact evolves throughout the book, from a mere synonym for the “sensible,” to the force of desire, to “difference.” The “figural” in its modulations characterizes some of the aspects of what we called haunting or the presence in a text of elements that resist the general line of meaning and appear whenever the language of the text ceases to be a transparent medium. These elements produce alternative messages that read against the grain of meaning. They are the traces of primary processes in the text. Lyotard’s analysis starts as an angry protest against signification as it excludes the dimension of perception. The imperialism of the signifier manifests itself first and foremost as a denial of the world of the senses: This book protests: that the given is not a text, that there is a density or rather a constitutive difference which is not to be read but to be seen and that this difference and the immobile mobility which reveals it is what is continually forgotten in the process of signification.35

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The figural is the forgotten “seen” buried in discourse. There seems to be, in the first stage of the book, a clear-cut opposition between the terms: discourse is the opposite of figure. On the side of discourse or representation by concept, one finds a series of negative terms: “text,” “read,” “signification.” Lyotard further adds to the list of anathema concepts such as “the letter,” “opposition,” “flatness.” All these terms suggest the univocal authority of determinate meaning. Language appears as a closed system of immaterial and conventional signs. On the side of figure, which has been reduced to a mere ghostly presence in our culture, there is a series of positive terms: “density”, the “line” or visible “difference.”36 There is designation. Whereas discourse corresponds to the universe of Saussurrean linguistics, figure refers to the materiality of the body in language and alludes to the density of a world of perception in which a subject and an object are imbricated, touching each other. The figural depth behind discourse is phenomenological. An example of the bodily density of subject and object that resists the flatness of textual space is deixis. Deictics are like lumps of the world that resist the churning process of signification. They indicate, point to and show, as if with a finger, the here and now in language. Their meaning is therefore exterior to the linguistic system: they are not signifiers that have been arbitrarily attached to a signified. “Here” and “now” are not in the system where signs make sense internally only in the artificial attribution of a signifier to a signified. Designation, the pointing of this index that says “here,” deconstructs the system of discourse because it imports into the system the exteriority of the speaker who says “this” or “here” in a language that by definition turns “this” into “that” and “here” into “there.” Language mediates between world and words, offering words instead of things. Gesturing towards the world, deictics introduce the world in the word, in an immediate and thus non-arbitrary relation. They point to the “coexistence of the body and space,” Lyotard explains (39). In the same way as “the deictic is not a simple value inside the system, but an element which from the inside refers to the outside” (115–16), the figural is that which in the system points to the outside of the system. As such, it cannot be described solely in opposition to discourse and indeed deconstructs this very notion of opposition, including the opposition between discourse and figure. “The figural,” explains Readings, “lies in the inevitable, impossible, undecidable co-existence of the radically heterogeneous orders of the figurative and the literal, of the motivated and unmotivated, the visible and the textually encoding in all discourse.”37 The figural is situated at the interstice, in the

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coexistence of contradictory moves: it is “immobile mobility,” as Lyotard was already saying on the first page of the book. It is both a margin to discourse and the space of its inscription. It is, in Readings’ words, “an unspeakable other necessarily at work within and against discourse, disrupting the rule of representation.”38 The figural is within the system, pointing outside of it, to the other side of it. The system carries its own transgression, and rules carry their own disruption. The choice is not between discourse and figure but in the deconstructive interdependence and imbrication of the two terms. Discourse and figure can be figural only in their correlation. An example of the figural in pictorial language is the anamorphosis, which forces the spectator to look awry in order to distinguish form behind confusion. An anamorphosis is the unexpected encounter between the mutually exclusive and yet inherently interconnected visible space of representation and a readable space. Holbein’s often quoted Ambassadors serves as the emblem of the way the figural works within discourse.39 Looking straight at the painting, we let our eye go through the medium as if through a transparent window, into a perfectly balanced and rational scene. But looking awry, our eye is arrested by the medium, by its materiality. The painted canvas no longer vanishes into representation. Rather, representation is fragmented as a series of enigmatic signs is given relief in the space of the visible, which then becomes totally flat and reveals its materiality. On the canvas, the tri-dimensional skull emerges in the transparency of the scene like a stumbling block, like indecipherable writing or to quote one of Lacan’s definitions of the Real, like a “bone stuck in the throat.” It is an eyesore, which belies the transparency of the scene and shows representation for what it is: a fallacy. The anamorphosis forces us to reject the apparent so as to aim at the non-apparent on the painting. We must refuse the immediately visible for the complex sign that must be read rather than seen through. The skull is pure heterogeneity. It belongs to another space, another time, and another scene than that of the portrait of the two ambassadors. This heterogeneous mass in the heart of the painting is figural because it transgresses the order of the visible, that is, it pushes the medium towards its own demise. It disrupts, temporarily, the “at homeness” of our body in the world of the painting which is suddenly both familiar and unfamiliar. The figural strangely echoes, in its effect upon the reader-spectator, the uncanny. It is “un-heimlich,” both known and unknown. Figuration and figures of speech are not necessarily figural in Lyotard’s sense of the term. They are always transgressive, but their transgression is codified, expected and regulated. Nonetheless one can see how

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a metaphor can play in writing the same part as that played by the anamorphosis in painting. The anamorphosis cuts the field of vision with an unreadable sign. The metaphor cuts verbal discourse with the visible. Michel Collot shows the analogy of metaphor and anamorphosis when he defines the figure of speech as “what forces us to see the thing because it arrests our attention on it.” In a metaphor, literal interpretation is made impossible; therefore the space of the imagination can open up, a space in which we draw the profile of the object. It is a profile that hesitates between a figure and a letter. Thanks to metaphor, the field of the visible hollows out the discourse.40 Metaphors interrupt the flow of communication and of direct comprehension, because they seize the object laterally, in its density and depth. A metaphor is a figure of the impossible because it shows all at once the visible and the invisible side of the object, just like Keats’s “Grecian Urn,” the visible side of which hides another scene, invisible to the external eye, until the poet, by an act of imagination shows us the surface and the depth, the unseen shadowy side and the luminous spectacle united together in a poem. Whatever is in the signifying system and yet does not make sense in its rules is figural. Thus, a phrase like “I music you,” an example quoted by Lyotard, would be figural because it goes against the grain of our understanding and crumples the text with delirious, aberrant traces.41 Similarly, in Clefs pour l’imaginaire, Octave Mannoni recalls a passage from Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, by M. Lowry, in which Sigbjörn and Primrose arrive at the hotel Cornada in Mexico. The name on the neon sign has been truncated, giving it a figural dimension: “the luminous name above the main entrance had been rather holophrastically, significantly as it turned out, reduced by three red letters, so that, as one might have seen this arrival in a dream, what seemed only to welcome them were the words: Hotel Nada.”42 The eye deciphering the luminous sign is suddenly forced to face a lack, a hole or physical absence. “Nada” in Spanish means “nothing” and it is this nothingness that strikes the eye, a plain, obvious, undeniable emptiness, where the fullness of Cornada was expected. The sign is more than the name of the place. It becomes a visual summary of it. “Nada” interrupts the flow of information and denotation by introducing the opacity of secondary meanings in the flatness of the name. “Nada” is the figural that haunts “Cornada.” The figure disrupts the arrangement with a violence

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that brings truth to the mind of the reader rather than knowledge. As Lyotard explains: Truth in no way passes through a discourse of signification, its impossible topos cannot be located by the coordinates of the geography of knowledge, but it makes itself felt on the surface of discourse by effects, and this presence of meaning is called expression.43 In the example given by Mannoni, the short circuit that crumples the name of the hotel is typical of the dream work and more particularly of the primary process. Condensation and displacement, the operations at work in the process, rework language, knead it as if it were matter, thus violating the very principle behind symbolization, namely that the sign is not material. The figural is the entry port of the unconscious in a text. Mannoni reads Lowry’s holophrastic neon “nada” in conjunction with another text which also illustrates how the unconscious pierces through the logic of meaning, reworking the signifiers into a dough from which another message emerges which has nothing to do with surface meaning. Mallarmé’s famous line in “Le démon de l’analogie”44 “la pénultième est morte” (the last but one is dead), which recurs obsessively, insists, “emptied of signification,” writes the poet. “Penultième” which triggers, inevitably, “est morte” does not make sense when looked at directly, that is to say analytically. But, looking at it awry, changing perspective, seeing or hearing rather than reading, we can then seize what jammed our understanding. “Nul,” the “last but one” syllable of “pénultième” is like a gaping hole in the word. “Nul,” “nothing” “is dead,” “est morte.” “Nul” can only make sense in the phonematic materiality of the word against its signification. It is the visible-invisible mark of an energy that condenses, displaces figures and transfigures in spite of the rules of signification. It is the “immobile mobility” that the ear can perceive only sometimes, as a detour of the signifier. The figural cannot therefore be defined only in phenomenological terms. Its activity is inseparable from the world of desire. “Pénultième” comes back from a forgotten depth in the poet. It strikes a chord, familiar and not familiar. It returns, hauntingly, dead in the signifier, yet undead in the phonemes “nul.” “Nul” condenses (that is both compresses and increases in density) layers of unconscious meaning phantomatically buried in “pénultième.” The heterogeneity and difference of the figural align it with the mechanism of the dream-work. “The dream-work does not think”: the title of Lyotard’s chapter is a direct rebuttal of Lacan’s motto: “the unconscious is structured like a language.” For Lyotard, the

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dream-work does not follow “the law of the signifier.” The importance of the dream never lies in the thought but in the work that informs and deforms the thought. “The dream,” Freud wrote, “is at bottom nothing other than a particular form of our thought made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which constructs this form and it alone is essential to the dream, the explanation of its particularity.”45 The dream-work is characterized by its force of transformation of the dream thought. It is not a transcription. Condensation, displacement and figurability, the first three mechanisms of the dream-work obviously disrupt the order of meaning. “They operate on the text as if it were material” (241). “They crumple the dream thought up, folding it, scrambling the signs it bears on the surface, fabricating new units which are not linguistic or graphic signs” (244). The fourth mechanism though, secondary revision seems to be on the side of discourse and logic. It makes sense and is coherent. Yet, secondary revision is not secondary in a sequential sense of the term. It operates on the production of the other three mechanisms, but is simultaneous with them. It is original and part of the dream-work. The dream-work therefore is figural precisely because it shows the imbrication of discourse and figure in the imbrication of secondary revision and primary processes (condensation, displacement and figurability). Secondary revision promises legibility and intelligibility. The promise is given at the same time as the interpretation is blocked, so that, ultimately, the pseudo marks of discursive logic are part of the general configuration or figure. Figural depth is increased by the very discursive presentation of the dream in secondary revision. The dream-work finally brings out hallucinatory satisfaction while suspending intellectual faculties and yet pretending they are functioning. The dream-work is therefore not a rebus, precisely because the rebus ultimately delivers what it promises: it can be deciphered, although the rules it follows are neither that of the visual (the image in the rebus) nor that of the linguistic (the text) discourse. The work of art functions along the same lines as the dream-work: in its figuration, it offers a mixture of discourse and figure. A force that ceaselessly challenges received meaning and promotes ambiguity inhabits it. Yet the work of art, unlike the dream-work, does not bring fulfilment, but promotes endlessly renewed pleasure. The definition of the figural therefore requires further refinement. It lies in the difference between the sensible and the discursive systems. It lies in the transgressions of desire against secondary processes, but it is also a “critical principle.” In a dream, transgression brings satisfaction because the subject has relinquished his/her conscious position and thus regresses

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to a form of archaic, undifferentiated bliss. In art, desire is exposed but unfulfilled because there is no total relinquishing of one’s conscious position in language. Instead, there is what Peter Dews calls a “critical reversal.” “The reversal consists in the process whereby the work of art turns back on the process of its production and disrupts the world of illusion which it is its own deepest tendency to generate.”46 The poetic text is figural when it lets through the force of desire but also shows us the seduction, without seducing us entirely. There is a self-critical dimension in the work of art, which is part of the “immobile mobility” that characterizes the figural. Subtly and endlessly regenerating, hollowing out and crumpling, the figural is what in our production is never settled out and fixed but always opens up the text to its difference, its other. Lyotard concludes Discours, Figure with an illustration from Hamlet of the “immobile mobility” of his concept. The players are presenting the tragedy of “Gonzague” to Hamlet. The player makes a slip of the tongue: “But who, O! Who had seen the mobled queen. . .?” Hamlet immediately questions the word: “mobled queen?” Polonius in turn, passes an artistic judgment on the phrase: “That’s good; ‘mobled queen’ is good.” The impossible “mobled queen” which irrupts in the speech of the actor like a disturbing force points to primary processes. It is a perfect example of condensation. “Mobled” is mobile. It is at one and the same time mob, motley, mother. It is all these things in disguise. It works through the text a mosaic of alternative meanings. This is the work of truth through the “disappropriation of meaning.” But “mobled queen” becomes figural not simply because it breaks the code of discourse, but also because of Hamlet’s question and the critical reversal it generates. The word turns back on the process of its production. The question points to the poetic dimension of the text, but also arrests the absorption into the fold of desire where the mobled queen is Gertrude for her son. The question suspends the accomplishment of desire.

The “Phonotext” (Garret Stewart) and the reading body Hamlet seizes in the player’s slip of the tongue the trace of an alien meaning. Seizing it, he also interrupts the movement by which the figural flash from the unconscious that undoes language disrupts meaning. Hamlet, according to Lyotard, has “an ear open to displacement in words” (387). His function as spectator is to complete the work of art with the work of interpretation.

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Interpretation is a work in the same way as the dream, it is not a commentary, it is not a metalanguage, it is above all an operative practice which does violence to the manifest organization of language, to its syntax, to its articulated signification. (381) Interpretation becomes a deconstructive practice, a figural practice which undoes the surface meaning to lay bare the truth of desire in the text when it is “free floating attention” rather than an analytical process. Free floating attention requires that one become sensitive to the creaking sounds, the flutter of language, its materiality, its unevenness and pulsation rather than its signification. The work of interpretation consists in looking and hearing awry, that is to say, perceiving difference in a system of oppositions. Figural interpretation requires that one stop reading and start seeing and listening. Free-floating attention is attentive only to the “ex-communicated” in discourse. The excommunicated is the sensible, the body and the materiality of language. It is the chaos behind the system, the madness of language, and may be the words of another, like pieces of the other buried in the subject’s speech. The excommunicated is the dark double of all communication. Radically heterogeneous to the system, it nonetheless lives within it, haunting it. But it can only appear in the privileged moments when the reader agrees to stop the hunt for meaning. Garret Stewart, in a fascinating book, Reading Voices, develops a theory of “phonemic reading” or “aural reading” which in many ways echoes what we have described as free floating attention or reading the other of discourse.47 He advocates a reading practice that is attentive to the dyslocutionary tensions between phonemic and graphemic signification and to the displacements that the analytic eye in search of easy food for thought cannot perceive in the text. Such jarrings are only perceptible if one reintroduces voicing in writing. The phonemic reader is a Barthesian reader who participates in the production of a text. The text is not a finished product. The text exists only insofar as it is read, and Stewart would add, read aloud. Voicing reintroduces the body, the body of the reader who encounters the materiality of the sounds of the text, in the process of creation. “Reading with an alien ear” can bring “the alien near,” in Stewart’s phonemic formulation.48 The reading body perceives the a-syntactic energy that disorganizes signification and promotes alternative meanings in the text. Segmental blurring, for instance, would operate some blending of sound and meaning and generate a new, subliminal sense.

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In any ordinary application of the figure/ground distinction to a written text, one would naturally consider the inscribed letters . . . as the effective “figure” to the blank inactive ground of white: the latter including junctural word breaks, interlinear spacing . . . as well as the frequent gaps between paragraphs, sections, chapters. At least within a normal syntactic span, phonemic reading . . . sensualizes the lexical interstices of such a ground, teases them into a kind of perceived activity, makes them continuous with the lettering as a potential space of interloping semiosis, of wording.49 Rewriting the distinction between foreground and textual backing, phonemic analysis corrodes the presumption of marmoreal stability of the written text. It insists on the gaps and plays with them, thus demonstrating that a text of course never says what it means but more importantly, “never says what it says.” It is always “at odds with its own processes from within the logic of wording itself.”50 Stewart’s work abounds in examples of what he calls “transegmental drifts” or the intersections of graphic and vocal patterns that reveal the overflow of signifying beyond signification. There is for instance Austin’s famous phrase. “In saying ‘iced ink’ I was uttering ‘I stink.’”51 “Iced ink” sliding into “I stink” clearly “thaws the iced fixity of scripted lexemes.”52 Beyond the graphic stratum of signification, lies an uncontrollable element: “the phonotext.” The phonotext is the other of the text, the “I stink” of “iced ink.” It speaks to the ear only. The phonotext works in and through the text as its unconscious, auditing the voice of the other and the other voices, those that have been buried, undead in the written words. The phonotext is the space where ghosts wander. It is the “horstexte” that haunts writing. In a similar vein, Louis Marin in “The I as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendhal’s Life of Henry Brulard”53 explains how, working on Stendhal’s autobiography, he came to reconsider the importance of visual and musical languages in the life of the writer. The written text seems always on the verge of opening up to other possibilities in which the ear and the eye give relief to the flatness of signification. In Stendhal’s autobiography, the mention of arias or paintings constantly interrupts the thread of the narration and invades its space at strategic turning points: “textual linearity is torn, the textual surface rent in some places and mended by something of a different nature, belonging to another way of writing or another substance or medium.”54 These heterogeneous spaces forcing us to look and listen rather than read, prepare the way for the introduction

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in the text of pure rhythmic palpitations, like a beating heart which can be heard only if the ear has been integrated in the process of the creation of the autobiographical text. This rhythm manifests itself in a series of capital letters that recur and yet do not make sense per se. They are initials that inaugurate another mode of being for the text. On the surface, they can be part of the chronological development as they are the initials of the women Stendhal loved throughout his life. Yet, no narrative is spun around the names, and no name comes to flesh the letters. They are graphemes that demand to be read aloud, spelled out. And as we spell them out, a mumble, a murmur, something primitive that takes us back before reading becomes perceptible. As Marin remarks: We are no longer able to read, to shape a word or a sentence with those letters . . . The effect of such an interruption of the story is that while seeing the graphemes, our reading capacities suddenly break off, our smooth and easy production of meanings at once becomes a kind of stammering . . . We are inclined to read and see at the same time.55 The graphic becomes phonic and visual at the same time. In the laterality of the text, which has become a murmur, a beating heart, there resounds the most primitive of our words. What emerges to the reading ear and the listening eye is “mama,” “m” and “a” over and over again and a rustle of other sounds that also stand for the maternal: “v,” “g.” “AAMAAAMA” is the ghost of the mother, “maman,” the first mother of infancy, buried and yet not buried in the process of symbolization. It is the ghost behind all the future love stories to come: “in the list where his life is written,” Marin concludes, “as the epitaph of his tomb, the mother’s name appears, ghostlike, as his life totalized at its origins.”56 In Henry Brulard’s Life, haunting is situated at the hinge between an acoustic and a visual image. It is the point where what Marin calls the “autobio-phonic” discourse can take place. Haunting here again manifests itself in the cracks of the system, when a grapheme becomes a thing, a sound, the trace of a forgotten sound buried in the memory, a sound that preceded any writing and which had to be buried in order for writing to take place. The sound remains undead, beneath the glassy surface of the text, waiting for an ear inattentive to meaning and yet tuned to difference. Sound overflows the blanks of the text and drowns the rigid Law of the Letter. Reintroducing voicing in reading, the body in and of the text, paradoxically generates what Stewart calls “illiteracy,” or in his phonemic formulation, “ill literacy.” The term describes what Virginia

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Woolf called chance reading, which happens sometimes, when we are drowsy or feeble with sickness and we read: “in health, meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence dominates over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne.”57 Meaning comes through the ear or eye when the inattentive senses become sensitive to the interstices of language. In its interstices, language is not empty. In Entretiens sur la poésie, Yves Bonnefoy goes even further than Virginia Woolf.58 Whereas for her, delirious inattentiveness only delays denotative deciphering and enriches it, Bonnefoy sees true reading as interrupted reading. Rather than being content with momentary “ill literacy,” the reader should “stop reading and lift his eyes from the page.” Total free-floating attention, to resume Lyotard’s own formulation, is the guarantee that the phantomatic can emerge, once signification stops operating exclusively. For Bonnefoy, the poem is phantomatic. The true meaning of the poem is hidden behind the words that necessarily fail to convey it. Bonnefoy’s dream is the old dream of a prelapsarian, presymbolic world, of an audiophonic sublime. What he calls celebration is an easy condemnation of cerebration. But his dream once again offers the possibility of something outside and yet within the text. That there is an anti-discursive energy at work in most literary texts, and more particularly in most texts pertaining to the literary traditions in which the fantastic is enacted, is the position this book wants to defend. The word “fantastic” means “made visible.” The very name therefore reintroduces the eye, the order of the visible, in discourse and invites another type of reading: reading as looking awry, beyond the intellectual meaning, looking with one’s bodily eyes and feeling with all one’s senses, so as to bring the “alien near.” Klee claimed that painting should not “account for the visible but make visible.”59 Painting must make visible forces that are not visible. Such a gesture is precisely what the fantastic does in writing. It liberates and makes visible forces that are usually not accounted for in the message. Fantastic writing is haunted writing not simply because it is set in open opposition to realistic fiction, as its other, but because it unleashes elements in the discourse that do not belong to the system, and because it conditions its reader to read “awry,” so as to liberate all the shadows that lurk in the interstices of language. Those shadows are phantoms, ghosts, madness and all the living dead the conscious mind had so carefully repressed. Haunted writing is the proof that there is an unconscious in and of the text.

3 Gothic as Poetics

What would it be like to inhabit a world, one of many possible ones, in which Gothic were seen “at the center”? —David Punter, Gothic Pathologies Following the cue or the ghost of Punter’s counterfactual thinking in this epigraph might well be a worthwhile exercise in order to look awry at our literary productions: if Gothic were at the center, then everything else would have to be decentered, and we would have to see the world athwart from the distorting perspective of the ghost, and then things that were buried behind the surface of texts would start appearing, forcing us to read differently. The past would be given pride of place as that which colors the present and the future, beyond our understanding and our control. Resurrecting our psychic and cultural past would then lead us to question the notions of origin, authority, individualism and freedom. Language and communication would appear for what they are: mere hosts for ghosts. Silence, the sign of a repressed in the text, would be more eloquent than words, and the unsaid would matter more than the actual message. Reshuffling the cards, we would be struck by the fact that this counterworld is in fact very similar to our post-Freudian world, as if psychoanalysis had acted out the scenario envisaged here as a mere figment of a literary critic’s imagination. The Gothic is an inherent component of our modernity as critical mode. That the subject is a speaking subject and that his boundaries and his truth exceed his language is the intuition shared by the Gothic and psychoanalysis. The subject is structured by his language, but language as a social construct, a symbolic system is necessarily haunted by the shadows of what it represses. “Haunted writing” therefore, far from being an “ex-centric” or decentered concept is a central concern. “Haunted writing” is writing 57

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inhabited by an unspeakable other which is at work within and against discourse. In the Gothic, this other, an anti-symbolic force of chaos manifests itself thematically and formally. Clichés, anachronisms, and literalized metaphors, materializing a fantastic impulse, go against the grain of the intended linear meaning of the text and signal the presence in language of a linguistic other. The Gothic is the world of linguistic crypts harboring unspoken secrets that are conveyed without being stated. In the Gothic where the previous generations control the younger generations, the secret is never the mark of the subject. It is always the unsaid of another, that is, someone else’s secret, unknowingly transmitted from generation to generation. This idea of the subject as mere phantom-carrier, alienated in the language of another completely undermines the foundational certainties of our Cartesian apprehension of the world and revises radically any conception of language as a transparent medium. As the necromantic art of bringing the dead back and preserving their secret or the secret of their “undeath” in the “textual crypts”—the unspoken layers of the text—the Gothic must be read as the literature of melancholy. Literal and regressive, melancholy rejects and ignores the rules of the symbolic. The dead are never dead, and things never totally disappear behind the signifiers that represent them.

Theories of the fantastic: Rereading Todorov Marcel, the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past recalls how the shadows projected on the walls of his room at dusk by a magic lantern captured his mood of uneasiness and opened in him a space for the uncanny to creep in. “Melancholy things” fantastically haunt the room, transformed and defamiliarized by the magic light. Suddenly, the child is no longer alone, the loved ones are no longer absent and the subject no longer constrained in a clear spatiotemporal frame. At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go to bed and lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my room became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centered. Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract myself on evenings when I felt abnormally wretched, a magic lantern which used to be set on the top of my lamp while we waited for dinner time to come. And, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls, an

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impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable. Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time. [. . .] The anesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think—and to feel—such melancholy things.1 The image of the magic lantern strikes the perfect note to define the fantastic in its untenable position, in its poise between contraries. The fantastic is born of the impossible stasis between figure and ground, opacity and transparency, depth and surface, inside and outside. Like a window the pane of which defines both an inside and an outside, translucent and opaque, the fantastic, or what Freud identifies as “uncanny” atmosphere, thrives on uncertainty and promotes hesitation. But in itself, this definition is problematic: it is indefinitely deferred in a series of analogies. The fantastic is “like the magic lantern” which itself is like a “shifting and transitory window.” It is “a frontier between two adjacent realms,” Todorov writes. It is “impalpable.”2 Or it is “a literature of desire which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss,” according to Jackson.3 One can only be struck by the difficulty critics encounter when trying to define the fantastic. It is as if the notion itself refused to fit the grid of our critical idiom yet haunted it with its unresolved questions: it is a genre or a mode, an element or a style? In my perspective, the fantastic is a fantasy, a possible horizon of all texts rather than a genre4 or a mode.5 The fantastic fantasizes a violent attack upon the symbolic order. The Gothic is haunted writing because it displays the possibilities of fantastic figural distortion. It is the resistant trace of a time and a space incommensurable with that of a discursive meaning. Like an event in Lyotard’s sense of the term, “it disrupts any pre-existing referential frame within which it might be represented or understood.”6 I therefore follow Katherine Hume’s redefinition of the fantastic as an impulse: “it is truer to literary practice, she writes, to admit that fantasy is not a separate or indeed separable strain, but rather an impulse as significant as the mimetic impulse, and to recognize that both are involved in the creation of most literature.”7 Any form of literature can be perceived as fantastic.8 The fantastic functions like a drive. It is a force within language, which seems to push signification away

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from mimesis and to undo the sense of objective reality the symbolic system creates. It is an impulse at the heart of language, which runs counter to the system but comes from within the system. In the same way as the relationship between discourse and figure cannot be reduced to a mere opposition, the fantastic is not merely an “underside” of realism in discourse. Punter, for instance, remarks how in the Gothic, the fantastic element does not simply turn the natural into the supernatural, thus serving the important function of removing the illusory halo of certainty from the so called “natural world.” The Gothic also throws the supernatural into doubt and “the reader is placed in a situation of ambiguity with regards to the fears in the text.”9 Never settling down in one of the alternatives (this is our world or this is a supernatural world), it constantly functions on the mode of “critical reversal. The text turns back on the process of its production and disrupts the world of illusion it tends to generate.”10 The fantastic thrives on this dialectical move rather than a mere inversion. In Radcliffe’s universe for instance, our decoding of the world according to the pre-set rules of rationality is constantly offset by the invasion of unaccountable and unregulated phenomena. But these are never taken for granted either, and the novels engage in long discussions on the natural and the supernatural which unsettle both positions, until the last pages, where a choice seems finally made and yet does not completely convince the reader. Terry Castle points to the destabilizing nature of the fantastic in the Gothic when she analyzes the limitations of a reading that concentrates on “the supernatural explained” in Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction.11 Of course, the so-called ghosts of both Udolpho and Chateau Le Blanc turn out to be flesh and blood pirates or prisoners. But if the supernatural is debunked, it is not to promote a “natural reading” either. There are “true” ghosts in The Mysteries of Udolpho: they are actual “real beings.” Thus, Castle explains, Valancourt haunts Emily’s thoughts but he also actually appears to her, like a ghost, at the precise moment when he is in her thoughts. He haunts her favorite spots and springs up when least expected, as if indeed to prove that “ghosts are thoughts,” but, more fundamentally that “thoughts are ghosts.”12 In Radcliffe’s universe, the other is “spectralized,” spectralization being “the absorption of ghosts into the world of thought.”13 The spectralization of the other comes as a challenge to the modern rationalist conceptions of the mind: rationality itself is but a ghost, as a thought suddenly becomes the ghost it was evoking. Castle, for instance, quotes the passage where Emily, thinking of Valancourt who was far away, sighs: “should we ever meet again!” The mere ghost

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of a thought, as if by magic, gives birth to the ghostlike appearance of the lover: “she heard footsteps approaching, and then the door of the pavilion opened, and, on turning, she saw—Valancourt.”14 Ghosts are the product of discourse and discourse itself is phantomatic. The supernatural undermines rational certainties as well as its own constructions, but the supernatural explained should not be equated with the disappearance of the fantastic, which is a principle inherent in discourse and language rather than a narrative moment. The fantastic is inscribed in the text as the potential critical reversal of discourse into its own ghostly double. Because the fantastic appears when a text “can be read on several and often paradoxically contradictory levels,”15 because it is the principle of ambiguity at work in language, then the fantastic “can and perhaps should be found in all sophisticated (complex) narratives, at any time, with varying degrees of predominance and various types of manifestations according to the period.”16 For Christine Brooke-Rose the fantastic is not a category in itself, but rather another name for the absolute ambiguity of the “aesthetic function.” The fantastic is an inherent part of the literary text and the free-play of the signifiers. It is stereophony, cacography, polytonality and polysemy. The fantastic is in the reader’s ear and eye when he/she gives in to free-floating attention. Brooke-Rose’s description of what she refuses to call the “fantastic” calls to mind Barthes’ notion of the “writerly text.”17 The writerly text is like a stained-glass window, one of those windows painted by “the glass-painters of gothic days,” “shifting and transitory.” In the same way as Marcel’s room takes on unexpected relief and becomes multifaceted seen through the window-like magic lantern, the meaning of the writerly text shifts and proliferates. The reader is not taken through the text, oblivious of the medium, into a possible world. The writerly text writes itself with our readerly interruptions, hesitations and jubilations. The fantastic is part of the density of a text. A fantastic text is unreadable, and it suspends meaning in the opacity of language rather than proposing a clear, orderly reflection of reality. Brooke-Rose’s contention that any sophisticated text contains a “fantastic element” because a text worth reading does not simply present in its transparency an objective world but necessarily also challenges its own practice, reinterprets Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as purely cognitive hesitation. Todorov’s emphasis on cognitive hesitation does not address the way the fantastic as “event” wreaks havoc in signification and in discourse. A fantastic text might well be a sophisticated text that stages its own ambiguity. The illusion that language reflects reality

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and that it is a pure transparent means to an end is a fiction created by the bourgeois worldview, which has imposed itself through cultural productions since the seventeenth century. With the fantastic, this fiction collapses and is seen through. “The fantastic attempts to create a space for a discourse other than the conscious one and it is this which leads to its problematization of language, of the word, in its utterance of desire,” Jackson explains.18 This questioning of the transparency of language and of the adequacy of words is staged forefront in all the texts of the Gothic tradition as well as in fantastic tales such as the story of the Onuphrius, the fantastic artist and the artist of the fantastic, caught in a universe of signifiers that cannot communicate and therefore create a “(short)-signifying-circuit because they are connected up with a network of limitless images.”19

The Gothic and the paternal narrative As the discourse of the Enlightenment unfurls its luminous waves of certainties, “ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead dead flourish in an era where you might expect them to be dead and buried without a place.”20 The Gothic haunts modernity with the ghosts of the past, of a darker age from which the light of the modern age emerged but from which it cannot be dissociated. Transgenerational haunting (the revisiting of the inequities of the fathers on younger generations), intertextual haunting (the reaching of each gothic text beyond its predecessors), but also the haunting of the symbolic order by what it excludes and rejects are inextricably linked in the Gothic where thematic and formal concerns mirror one another. The fear within the text is also the fear of the text. There is something of the terror of literature in the literature of terror. The gothic tale is more than the expression of the supernatural in imagery, and more than a subgenre that emerges in the wake of the realist novel, as its alternative. Far from being mere escapism and easy recourse to the supernatural in a nostalgic dream of a return to the medieval past and world order, the Gothic is truly “terrorist.” It is an open-ended form. Historically dominant in the era of Revolutions, it nonetheless recurs and returns to disrupt the canon, from Walpole to David Lynch, from The Castle of Otranto to Lost Highway. Following the curves of historical upheavals, it is a marker of cultural crises. The Gothic is writing that undoes its own work, whether it be the construction of illusion or the illusion of reality. From the time of its very emergence, the Gothic seems to have been split into two categories. Radcliffe, for instance distinguishes between

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novels of terror, in which order collapses only momentarily and later is triumphantly restored, and novels of horror, in which chaos is never overcome. Her distinction led to a gendered categorization of the Gothic with feminist studies. In the female Gothic, the protest against patriarchy amounts to terror: it is voiced, leads to momentary chaos but is overcome as the heroine finally finds her place in the symbolic. This is the narrative line of the Radcliffean model, the novel of terror.21 In the male gothic, the novel of horror, in Radcliffe’s distinction, the retreat from the world of the symbolic seems more permanent. The male Gothic is concerned with the rupture of self-boundaries, as we will see in the case of The Monk by Lewis, while the female Gothic is concerned with the establishment of these boundaries.22 Kate Ferguson Ellis, for example, argues that in the “feminine Gothic, the heroine exposes the villain’s usurpation and thus reclaims an enclosed space that should have been a refuge from evil but has become the very opposite, a prison.”23 Anne Williams shows that there are in fact two different sets of literary conventions behind the terms male and female gothic.24 My purpose here is neither to revise this categorization nor to collapse male and female Gothic, but to consider the Gothic as an attack on the symbolic from all fronts. Male and female Gothic traditions have known a similar fate in literary history. They have been marginalized as “feminine” literature. From their shared peripheral position as the literary “other”, both male and female Gothic modes, represented here respectively by The Monk (M. G. Lewis) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (Mrs. Radcliffe) can be perceived as displaying anti-discursive forces. The Gothic is traditionally regarded as dangerous because it can influence young girls and points to the pitfalls of the world of grown-up sexuality and greed in which men use them as commodities. But the danger is also that the Gothic undermines the basis of a classical liberal society as it is constructed and reinforced in literary discourse. With the Gothic, the “house of fiction,” in James’s phrase, is haunted. The Gothic is “like a window through which we can get a glimpse of the interior of that apparatus.”25 In the house of fiction, logic of argument and structure, sequentiality and adequacy, finality and unity of the text reign. These elements, which constitute what Saïd calls the textual conventions of the classical novel, are perceived as mere apparatus in the Gothic.26 These conventions, conveying the imagery of succession and hierarchy, create what Saïd calls the “paternal discourse.” The premise of the classical text is that meaning is engendered in the series of genealogical connections that constitute the text, namely authortext, beginning-middle-end, or reader-interpretation. The classical text

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develops a model of “authority” which mirrors the very principles of the middle-class and patriarchal culture. But the Gothic attacks authority from within, challenging the idea of genealogical connections and undermining discourse as ghostly. There is not always an “author” to the Gothic text, rarely a linear plot and hardly ever a clear-cut ending. This is why, characteristically, the gothic has always been a disparaged genre, right from its early days when the critical institution classified it as much despised low culture. The easy assimilation between feminine, popular and gothic is not due merely to the fact that most of the novels pertaining to the genre written between 1770 and 1840 were written by women. “On a theoretical level,” Mudge remarks, “the reviewers insisted that the debate about good and bad novels remains inextricable from definitions of good and bad women. As a result, Gothic fiction was depicted as prostituting itself to popular taste and as embodying aesthetic diseases capable of infecting the body politics.”27 Mudge’s fine analysis of the critical debate over the gothic and of the stigma that came to be attached to the literature of “passion” bears on the debate over prostitution, which in the 1840s led to the Contagious Diseases Acts. The intent and rhetoric of the attack on the Gothic reappears, a few decades later, word for word and point by point in the attack on prostitution as the source of all evils. A Gothic novel is a bad novel, a lawless text, and Gothic novels have to be relegated to the margins of culture before they contaminate wives and daughters. It is precisely from the margins and from its marginal position that the Gothic derives its power. The Gothic, immediately associated with the body, materiality and femininity, betrays the dis-ease of a culture by pointing to the inadequacies of the Law, which is erected by means of repression only. The concurrence between the Gothic and what was happening across the Channel in the 1790s does not simply make of the Gothic the narrative equivalent of or ambiguous response to the French Revolution. If the storming of the Bastille looms behind the vision of the angry mob tearing apart the convent of Saint Clare in The Monk,28 or if Emily’s imaginary bandits in The Mysteries of Udolpho look very much like an army of “sans-culottes,” the revolution is more than a thematic thread that weaves together texts from a period. Regardless of what the response to the revolution is, either exaltations in The Monk or intrinsic distrust and fear as in Radcliffe’s fiction, the Gothic always betrays a revolutionary instinct and impulse. Thus, although The Mysteries of Udolpho presents history as a nightmare from which one wakes up to find it untrue, and out of which one emerges to consolidate and secure bourgeois values, nevertheless, its formal disruption in the expression of

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extensive fantasies thoroughly challenges the basis of narrative conventions. When order is restored, in Radcliffe’s universe, it is as a mimicry, a pure artifice, and its status is as fragile as that of the supernatural world of terror and fear: it is not unquestionable. Traces of disorder haunt the expressions of “rational happiness” as if the power of “the vicious” was not as “transient” nor “their punishment [as] certain” as it seemed on the surface of the text.29 Typical of the Gothic, in its debunking of the paternal narrative, closure is refused, and without closure, meaning lies in limbo, undecided. Normalcy is never completely recovered. In The Monk, the last word overcasts the pretense of divine justice that the last section seems to dispense. “Corpse” is the final note, and thus, the abject has the last word, denying all efforts at cleansing and growing up. In The Italian, the joy of “the happy journey” turns into delirium as Paulo wishes to “fly in the sea, swim in the sky or tumble over head and heels into the moon.”30 Reason does not ultimately triumph and Paulo advocates “speaking before thinking” at the close of a narrative, which should demonstrate the triumph of the rational over superstition and passion. The Castle of Otranto sets the tone and is symptomatic of the disruptive patterns the Gothic creates. There seems to be a logical ending, in the formulaic marriage of the two members of the younger generation left alive in the war of retribution waged by the elders. Yet, “happiness” is tainted by the lingering melancholy of the groom who has absented himself from the joy of the present. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the ending seems to be an appeal for further haunting as the text surreptitiously casts shadows on the very lights it strives to describe. Emily’s marriage is drenched in the gloomy mode it is supposed to supersede. The “superb new tapestry,” far from opening prospects for future happiness, is still branded with past violence, and it depicts the Saracens “with their horrible visors, advancing to battle.”31 To the end, tapestries in the novel continue to be metaphoric equivalents of the complexity of the narrative web. They carry the dust of years scattered on the web of narrative development. It was the tapestry that best told of the Marchioness’ story. In the end the new tapestry again tells of old times, of superstitions and “necromantic feats.”32 Ghosts are still woven in the narrative warp. The “banners” floating over the gothic window continue to tell a family story, the secrets of which are still buried. The castle remains a gothic edifice and, to the end, the narrator insists on its complex configuration and its “winding galleries.” There remains a mystery, but like the castle’s architectural structure, no one can get to the bottom of it. The house and the

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family remain partially unexplored. “A house makes secrets in merely being itself, for its function is to enclose space,” Anne Williams writes.33 The music echoing from the great hall brings back the memory of other echoes, from a mourner who will mourn for eternity. The image of Laurentini looms over the castle, over the newlywed with a power that only the undead have. Their presence “lingers close” (671), familiar and yet unfamiliar. Annette’s commentary on the marriages, delivered as it is from the margin of her subaltern social position, attacks laterally any sense we can have of a permanent return of rationality in the world of the novel: “she fancied herself in an enchanted palace, and declared that she had not met with any place which charmed her so much, since she read the fairy tales” (671). There remains a spell over the place. The derealization of space that is suggested in the fairy tale atmosphere of the last page once again suggests that the self is still not master of its own house. Emily’s lot is clearly intertwined with Lady Blanche’s. And the banners that float over their marriages, “waving over the gothic points of painted casements,” are a reminder that the Gothic is still there, distorting and tainting the light with the shadows and the tales inscribed on its stained glass windows. Transparency does not return. There remains, interposed between the outside world of reality and the inside world of the palace, an opaque window on which scenes from the past stand in relief, cutting through the light. There is no sign of a future in the last chapter of The Mysteries of Udolpho, in spite of its conventional ending. The narrative lingers on ancient houses and old trees, both the embodiment of family history and family lines. Everyone is part of a house or included in a family tree. In La Vallée, the newlyweds haunt the familiar haunts of Emily’s parents, unable to shed the past and start afresh. They also retreat under the “plane tree on the terrace” (671), precisely where the novel started. The tree is of course the symbol of St. Aubert who “was a descendant from the younger branch of an illustrious family.” “Gothic plots are structured according to the ramifications of the family tree,” explains Williams.34 One does not start anew. The plot turns out to be circular, suggesting that Emily’s freedom is limited. Her life is governed by a secret agenda, an imperative not her own. She first meets Valancourt, himself the younger son of an illustrious family under the tree, which represents her father and is haunted by his ghost. The real haunting that takes place in the novel is therefore not the one suggested in the gossips of the servants. It is the haunting of a house, a tree, a family history that silently and irremediably cuts off any prospect of independence for the younger generations. No one is ever the master of one’s own house.

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Haunting ultimately attacks bourgeois values to the core. It is the symptomatic proof that “the center cannot hold,” that the system of beliefs of our culture hides pitfalls and unwanted counter-truths. There is no such thing as a self-made individual. An individual is a family, a house and a family tree. In the recesses of each of us lurks a past that is not ours but that, nonetheless, conditions our every move.

Anachrony and analepsis The Gothic is always of another time: “Old castles, old pictures, old histories and the babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one,” Madoff comments.35 The Gothic is never contemporary with itself. Chronology is problematic in a universe in which the past has never been a present and remains a mythical point of reference. For instance, the dusty tapestries of chateau Le Blanc are already faded in the distant and undetermined Middle Ages in which the Mysteries of Udolpho is set, and Udolpho is already a ruin at the very heart of the gothic period. The double bind in the Gothic is that the past remains an impossible referent and that the present, against which this past is pitched in a critical stance, is itself never present. The critical value of anachronism appears clearly if one returns to Saïd’s terminology: a narrative or “paternal discourse,” promotes the idea of origin, hierarchy, authority and succession. But in the Gothic, repetition and temporal confusion undermine the idea that events follow one another in a defined order. Haunting also undermines the idea of succession because the ghostly past that inhabits the present taints and blurs its limits. The Gothic is inherently analeptic, as it stages the return of the past generations in a present that is never present. This distortion of chronology and logic affects the very notion of subjectivity. Subjects are haunted and do not belong to themselves. They are not contemporary with themselves, and perform actions that only make sense beyond the frame of the present where they find themselves ungrounded. The ghosts that stalk the pages of Gothic fiction contribute to the shattering of the symbolic system as their stories exceed and thus explode the limits of the text they contaminate. The Gothic goes anti-clockwise. Maggie Kilgour remarks that “reading [Gothic] novels was seen as an impediment to moral growth.”36 Whereas in the classic realist text, the paternal narrative, the moral growth of the audience is in direct relation with the growth of the character, in the Gothic, the pattern is reversed. The reader is confronted with an anti-bildungsroman in which the upward trajectory towards

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maturity and social integration is replaced by a circular pattern of static repetition, and where progress is mocked by the erratic moves of chase and escape. The Gothic hero does not grow up. Count Dracula stands as a model of the genre. He is the eternal child, eternally old and young at the same time, a child who is born from the tomb to delay and protract his victims’ entrance into the world of adult sexuality. His universe is that of endlessly triumphant oral drives. Nothing in the Gothic guarantees the internal coherence of the subject. Secrecy, for instance a major Gothic trope, no longer proves a refuge for subjective integrity. A secret should work like a fetish: it is the pretense of “something” where there should be nothing. It should be the guarantee of the identity of the subject, a private place where “I” am alone, regardless of the way the world tries to construct or destroy “me.” I have a secret, therefore I am. According to Smirnoff, “the secret organizes in the discourse of the subject a place where he/she can preserve his/her identity against all form of intrusion.”37 But Gothic secrets, instead of covering up the constituting gaps of the subject with a narcissistic armor, are always revealed for what they are: narcissistic constructs. Wilkie Collins’ novels clearly exemplify this dimension of the Gothic secret. In The Woman in White, the narrator examines the copy of the register of Old Welmingham Church in order to find out who Sir Percival Glyde truly is behind his secretive air: I found the double register of the marriages of the two brothers. And between these entries, at the bottom of the page? Nothing! Not a vestige of the entry which recorded the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde and Cecilia Jane Elster in the register of the church.38 The secret turns out to be “nothing,” a blank, a void. The subject is “nothing,” no one, an imposture. The secrecy is a mere shell to protect the internal void of the subject. The subject does not resist the emptying devices of the Gothic. The novel of terror clearly questions the model of the bildungsroman, which seems to correspond to a masculine model of experience only. The road of life is the road to manhood and social integration. There is no successful entry into the symbolic as instrument of socialization in The Mysteries for instance. The typical Gothic plot is a plot of delayed development. The bashful heroine, on the model of Emily St. Aubert, is condemned to a mock journey in geographical space but not in social space, while her coming-of-age does not correspond to a genuine internal growth. At the end of the novel, Emily superficially seems

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to conform to the ideal set by her father who strove “to inure her to habits of self command; to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings, . . . to resist first impressions and to acquire a steady dignity of mind.”39 Yet, she never becomes a fully autonomous individual and is always subjected to the authority of father figures. Count De Villefort is a surrogate father and Valancourt himself, as has often been noted, duplicates St. Aubert. His very name ties him closely to La Vallée, the family house, the place haunted by the memory of the father. La Vallée, Emily’s birthplace is the ultimate station in her journey. Moving from father to husband, she goes in a circle. To a circuitous journey in space corresponds an inability to promote a temporal sense of progress. Radcliffe’s texts betray a morbid inability to cast off the slough of the past and to conceive and demonstrate change. The sense of an indistinct and ahistorical past lays like a gray mist on the text. It confuses and blurs distinctions. The past inhabits the core of Gothic language in the form of clichés. The profusion of clichés in the Gothic can be read as the lingering trace of the myth of Gothic ancestry, as a utopian instinct that allows the writer to pitch the past against the turbulent present. Clichés in the text clash and grate as properly u-topian, that is without a place because from another time. The cliché is the very figure of haunting. In its discordant mode, it raises the shadow of a past that resists integration in the present of narration. It is a mark of anachronism in the text. But it also marks the gaps and the lack in the language of the subject. A cliché expresses a cultural position. It is a “parole” of culture as opposed to a personal “parole.” As such, it is the underside of style. Style is authentic and private language. When a cliché stands out and jars in a sentence, the fluidity of personal voice has given way to the static and stultified expression of an ideologico-cultural moment. Laurent Jenny calls the cliché a “snapshot of signification” which turns a signification into a fixed form.40 Signification is arrested and fixed, becoming the mere signal of another time and space. Today’s clichés are yesterday’s live expressions reappropriated and emptied out of their spontaneity. The formulaic nature of the Gothic makes it prone to the use of fixed, static outdated phrases and conventions. Their function is to undo the fluidity of the narrative and thus undermine its principles. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance, peasants systematically live a life of bucolic pleasure, dancing and singing in green landscapes, the perfect images of prelapsarian happiness. The musical instruments are “pastoral” and the human groups systematically labeled “happy groups” (90 and 421), while the dance can only be “debonnaire” (66). All the

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descriptions of picturesque landscapes could indeed come as examples of the systematic use of readymade phrases, with their recurring adjectives and superimposable outlines. Their presence in the narrative is paradoxical. They do not contribute to the narrative plot and action. In fact, they arrest the narrative flow. Sedgwick, for instance, remarks that the “insistent landscapes . . . all seem to tell the same story but often interrupt the narrative as eagerly as if all braided together in a suspenseful subplot.”41 The Gothic ceaselessly undercuts its own tendency to produce a linear narrative. Furthermore, as Sedgwick also notices, the various characters of Gothic stories, when seen individually, clearly appear to have no individual features. In The Monk, for instance characterization turns into a series of clichés, when Antonia, for instance, is seen not only as the image of virginity but also is transformed into the static representation of the Virgin. We see nothing beyond the “dazzling whiteness of her chaste neck” (37). White and blue, she is the Virgin Mary. “Her dress was white; it was fastened by a blue sash . . . A chaplet of large grains hung from her arm” (37). Her virginity is both iconic and anachronistic. The scene of Antonia in her bath of course crystallizes the sum of readymade images into a white and blue tableau, into a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation with a wanton linnet for a dove. Lewis plays with the conventions of masculinist cultural representation. And in doing so, he reveals how much of a cliché the virgin as Virgin has come to be. The whole system of course collapses as a virgin remains virginal for as long as she is not exposed to gazes and appropriated by a cultural discourse. A virgin seen and represented in her nakedness is no longer a virgin. The cliché thus undermines the discourse it seems to represent. Furthermore, the cliché here points to its own anachronism in a text which, written in the wake of the French Revolution, and in the context of British culture, is at odds with the Catholic past it puts forth.42 The cliché becomes a point of resistance in and of the text.

The question of origin Taking as its moment of reference a mythical medieval past, rejecting all sense of progress, whether personal or historical, the Gothic constantly rehearses its obsession with the issue of origin. This concern impregnates the deepest layers of the text. Not only does it recur on a thematic level, it also infiltrates the narrative structure. The typically Gothic frame narrative or the just as conventionally gothic device of the found manuscript bear witness to what is truly at stake in the

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Gothic. The Gothic undermines all forms of authority and questions the very possibility of originality. The Gothic denies the possibility of engendering, fathering, being the author of a narrative that develops a line of argumentation. It undermines any attempt at finalizing meaning and at being original. Walpole himself, the “father” of the Gothic, conceived his novel as an open-ended object constantly in the making as it was being read and reinterpreted. Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto “in defiance of rules, of critics and of philosophers,” as he told Madame de Deffand.43 Vijay Mishra reports how Walpole exulted when in 1796 he saw drawings by Bertie Greatheed depicting and elaborating on some episodes of his novel. These drawings demonstrated his vision of the text as potentially expandable and not the work of one author. Mary Shelley’s 1831 Preface to Frankenstein also centers on the issues of origin and authority.44 The author is shown as the product of an intellectual environment. Mary Shelley undermines narrative authority by presenting the author as a “close imitator” (167), and writing as always “second hand.”45 The “author” of Frankenstein carries in her the ghosts of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Byron or Shelley’s writings. Their words, like the numerous texts Mary Shelley read, live a life of their own in her mind and generate a text that is by nature derivative. The 1831 Introduction sets the tone: it shows creation as production and haunting. It denies the text a parent, but recognizes the principle of haunting and intersubjectivity. Frankenstein is a story made of other stories, and a story of warped origins in which fathers can never warrant legitimacy. Each of the embedded narratives that constitute the body of the text duplicates the logic exposed in the “appendage” that the Introduction constitutes. Walton’s story is that of a failed writer desperately in search of roots and legitimacy. To that effect, he turns towards the maternal world of the frozen pole, the sea of ice beyond the limits of social space. Victor’s desire to engender another being clearly mirrors Mary Shelley’s creative impulse. The failure of his enterprise directly echoes the lack of authority Mary Shelley sees at the origin of her fiction.46 The tale of the monster, his search for his origin, his lineage and his justification on earth simply voices out the subterranean theme of illegitimacy that runs through the other biographical accounts. The question of origin and authority therefore, does not only undermine the fiction of an omnipotent masterful “I” as the source of the narrative. It also resurfaces as the very core of the Gothic plot. The Gothic is the story of individuals who come to realize that their individuality is but a myth and their autonomy a fiction.

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The traditional Gothic plot becomes, as in The Old English Baron, the discovery, often by chance, of the hero’s origins and lineage.47 But anxiety surrounds the quest for identity, and the narrative concentrates nearly exclusively on the frustration that precedes the discovery. In Radcliffe’s novels too, the insecurity of one’s sense of selfhood plays a central role. Ellena, in The Italian, grows up in the care of her mother’s sister. She discovers in the villain Schedoni a father, to learn at the end that this father was her uncle. Origins are confused and suffused with hints of incestuous attachments and obscure family secrets. Emily, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, for her part, misled by resemblances between portraits and other superficial clues, reconstructs her family romance around unusual lines: daddy’s baby, mommy’s may be. She imagines herself as the daughter of the unhappy Marchioness whose sorrowful ghost haunts Chateau Le Blanc. Built around the idea of a secret, and more specifically a family secret, the Gothic stages the deepest fear of the subject: it challenges her narcissistic constructions as it questions her place in the family line. The Gothic, concomitant with the emergence of the new social order, betrays the unconscious fears of the triumphant middle class. Anxious to define itself in front of the old inherited nobility, the bourgeoisie concentrates on genealogical issues. Scientific investigations on heredity come to build up a class history for this emerging category. The search for solid and ancient grounds and even the necessity to build lineages and grow roots informs the bourgeois novel. The bourgeoisie is eager to give its own blood a definite color, to invent for itself origins that would be different from and superior to that of the aristocracy. This is the reason why orphans populate realist novels. The orphan is free from the taints of genealogy and chooses for himself his own origin. But on the other hand, this quest for self-justification on the part of the bourgeoisie also gives rise to anxieties. In the search for its mythic origins in an immemorial gothic past, the Protestant middle class does not simply encounter its demonized Catholic aristocratic ancestors. It also unburies its own lack of roots. The bourgeois house never offers the comfort of a home: the house is only the metaphor for the discomfort of bourgeois patriarchy and never a metonym for the family line unconditionally rebuilt. The unspeakable of the bourgeois family is its illegitimacy, its unjustifiable, parasitical position in the class structure. What has been deconstructed in the course of the Gothic narrative is never totally reconstructed. The plot of The Castle of Otranto is typical of this issue. It does not culminate in the reinstating of a lawful world order. The past and the present

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do not join together in Theodore. The present remains haunted by a sense of its own illegitimacy as Theodore’s legitimacy remains doubtful. As we have seen, the Gothic is haunted writing because it constantly goes against the natural grain of narrative logic. The Gothic plays with the genealogical connections of “the paternal discourse.” An author does not necessarily produce a text. The text does not necessarily unfold from the beginning to the middle to the end. Succession, hierarchy and legitimacy are undermined from within, in the theme and the structure of the texts. The lack of narrative continuity and the warped sense of time that dominate the Gothic are not momentary lapses or sign that the Gothic is a degenerate literary form. The Gothic is the bad conscience of the symbolic. My position is therefore close to Anne Williams’ thesis when she writes: “the Gothic is a ‘poetic’ tradition in Kristeva’s sense of language disrupted by the semiotic. [. . .]. It is language that signals a revolution within the established system.”48

The Gothic as anti-discourse If the Gothic is anachronistic, its archaism not only points to the past, but also reveals the modernity of the Gothic as a self-questioning literary mode. “The Gothic,” Mishra writes, “is a genre of fissure and fracture, a kind of anti-language.”49 The Gothic novel stages this selfdestructive instinct as plot material. Gothic characters are trapped by their own dysfunctioning language—a symptom of the dysfunction of the whole linguistic system. Benedict in Walpole’s scandalous play, The Mysterious Mother, worries: “is my poor language nauseous?”50 The most striking embodiment of the linguistic crisis in the Gothic is the recurring presence of the Inquisition. In The Italian, the Inquisition undermines the status of the subject whose language proves inadequate to guarantee his identity as well as his integrity. Vivaldi, threatened with being put to the question, decomposes, unable to produce a discourse that would make sense to the ear of the judge. His language, although reflecting the truth, is deprived of power and cannot demonstrate its truthfulness. The “question” is in fact characteristic of the whole process of internal collapse the accused undergoes. The question is a torture, a tearing apart of the integrity of the body and being of the accused. Language destroys the ideal of physical and psychical wholeness rather than reflecting or founding them. Robert Kiely sees the Gothic as a moment of collapse of humanistic conceptions of the subject. “The essence of the individual identity,” he writes, “has been dislodged from its human centers and diffused

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in an architectural construct which seems to have more life than the characters who inhabit it.”51 No longer in control of his environment, the subject is not a consciousness constructing the world and putting it into the grids of the symbolic. In her study of Gothic conventions, Sedgwick clearly demonstrates how concepts like psychic depth, and thus human centrality, no longer function in the Gothic novel. The Gothic offers a “self that is all surface” and is “established by a text as surface.”52 There is in the Gothic transferability between ground and inscription and therefore confusion between essence and surface or language and being. Writing has become a purely material act of inscription. Thus, a character is a set of “characters,” that is a set of signs in a determined system. Characterization is reduced to the inscription of legible signs on the skin of paper heroes. The letter of inscribed traits of personality has taken over the spirit of characterization, and the notion of private self has given way to mere markings on the visible surface of the being. The bashful heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance is often fused with the veil that characterizes her bashfulness. There is a contamination and sliding over of the veil and the veiled figure. “The pallor, attenuation, insistence once proper to the veil, then shifted to the veiled figure now proves widely contagious,” Sedgwick writes.53 Emily, unveiling the mysteries that surround her, pines away, as pale as a sheet, drops senseless, goes mute and inert. The Gothic secretly works at the decenteredness of individual identity. Gothic is a universe in which signifiers proliferate and multiply, detached from any signified. As Sedgwick remarks: The marks traced out on the flesh, paper, architecture and landscape are often not part of any language, but rather, circles, blots, a cross, a person’s image, furrows, and folds. [. . .] They act as pointers and labels to their material ground and not as elements in a syntactic chain that could mean something. Even the real words that get spelled out [. . .] lack something in discursiveness.54 In this world of proliferating signifiers, meaning becomes secondary, a mere accident rather than the primary motor behind the inscription. The materiality of language, the forgotten basis of the symbolic system comes back with a vengeance. The Gothic plays upon the deceptiveness and instability of language which is no longer representational and in which words no longer convey clear and distinct ideas. The medium refuses to remain transparent. It insists on a presence that undermines the clarity of communication. The Gothic is an anti-discursive practice.

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Broken words and stranded fragments of language: The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk Breaking the chains of signification, the Gothic sets free what Anne Williams calls “fragments of language.”55 These fragments, cut off from the flow of the text, come to have a life of their own against the grain of the text. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance, language clearly appears as the pole of resistance to meaning, rather than as its medium. The clashes between language and meaning are made more pregnant in the way the plot is conditioned not by human events, but by the free floating linguistic fragments which resist interpretation and integration in a system of meaning and lead to unexpected dramatic developments. In a key scene, Emily, at the death of her father, fulfills his last wishes and burns old letters that he kept hidden away. Yet, despite his last injunctions, she lets her eyes wander on the first lines of one of the letters. From then on, these lines, cut off from their context, wander and stalk the narrative. They take on a life of their own which runs counter to the narrative flow, yet often changes the course of action. Emily literally broke her word to her father. This broken word creates further havoc. The fragments stolen from the letter contaminate the plot with their ghostly presence, creating unexpected links between La Vallée, Chateau Le Blanc and Udolpho. They offer Emily the possibility of an alternative family story, a dark family romance according to which she would be the daughter of the dead Marchioness who haunts Chateau Le Blanc. Emily’s uneasy relationship with the symbolic is a very clear illustration of what is at stake in the Gothic’s subversion of language. She goes against the Law of the Father and thus helps bring forth not a traditional “paternal narrative” with a beginning, a middle and an end, but a circular narrative, and a story haunted by other stories. These are the stories of the lives of other characters who, like the dead Marchioness, inhabit the text yet do not belong to its chronology and remain beyond the frame of action. Emily, a young woman whose place in the symbolic remains unstable, as we can see in her frustrated efforts at expressing herself, discovers the ghostly nature of language, where words are neither dead nor alive. The words from the father’s letters are not quite consumed by the fire. Nor are they quite alive and able to convey transparent meaning. These words are living dead. Words are living-dead. That is why they become embodied in the ghost of the Marchioness. They come to haunt Emily’s nights and space with aberrant meanings.

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In The Monk, the haunting power of fragments of language is literally embodied in the exchange between Raymond de La Cisternas and the Bleeding Nun. The exchange is an exchange of vows in which each partner gives his/her word to the other. But each word becomes the thing it was supposed to represent. Each word is literalized as a concrete gift. Raymond unexpectedly ties himself to the ghost with ties stronger than words, with ties as vital as blood: “In my veins while blood shall roll / Thou art mine! / I am thine.”56 The blood that rolls in Beatrice’s veins is indeed Raymond’s, literally. As we come to discover, Raymond and Beatrice are the same, from the same family line, the same “blood line.” An accident of language brings them together, as the signifier “blood,” when it reaches Beatrice’s ears, becomes not the worn metaphor for love Raymond intended, but a metonym for “family.” The Symbolic shows its dysfunctional nature in such slippages when a link between a signifier and a signified ceases to be arbitrary and recovers a sensible reality. In Lewis’ novel, as in the universe of Radcliffe, a word, an unassimilated fragment of language extracted from the syntactic chain, gives birth to secret filiations. The subject vacillates, unable to master his own language. The Law of the Father cannot hide its family secrets. Words like things resurge from beneath the deadening process of signification. Words do not simply “mean,” they can also betray. In The Monk, the word “blood” betrays the irrevocable link between crime and family. At the origin of the family there was death and murder. It is this bad blood that constitutes the bloodline of the Cisternas and conditions all future love interactions in the family. Only the inadequacy of language in the form of a dead metaphor (love is blood) can bring back to life the undead nun, Beatrice, an oxymoron, a figure of speech in direct contradiction with the oppositional nature of language. The figurative and derivative nature of language brings forth its figural dimension, its force of disruption and subversion. Ghosts are inherent in each and every linguistic act. They are the shadows projected by each act of symbolization. Language itself originates in a murder when the thing disappears behind the word that fails to bring forth the essence of the thing in its actuality. Behind the towers of Gothic castles, Babel looms up. From a past where words were things, the ghosts of the Gothic come back, to haunt us with the plight of our condition as speaking subjects.

Catachresis and death in language Figures of speech are not ornaments in the Gothic. Taken at face value, they participate in a strategy of systematic destabilization of the symbolic.

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Although as we saw in Chapter 1 figuration is not figural because the upheaval it creates is momentary and because figures of speech are codified disruption within the system, it creates the conditions for a reconsideration of the workings of language. Language shows its material conditions. That in the Gothic, human “characters” turn into written signs and inscribed surfaces, or “blood” becomes bloodline and “house” stand for family, is not accidental. In the flatness of the discursive space, a depth is suddenly revealed. The Gothic looks awry at language, unveiling its endless possibilities for derivation and sliding of meaning. The Gothic unearths what lies dormant in language: its figurality. The Gothic rediscovers the intrinsically catachretic mode of language. Catachresis, Barthes writes, “sends us back to the infinity of codes.”57 “There is,” he continues, “no possible word to denote the wings of the windmill or the arms of the armchair, and yet wings and arms are immediately metaphorical.”58 The specificity of the Gothic impulse lies in the way it pulls language back to its point of emergence, to an immemorial linguistic past where words are poised between the literal or sensible and the symbolic. The Gothic revives the possibility of the literal choice. In The Castle of Otranto, for instance, “a figure of speech now falls from the sky with a weight which crushes one of the characters.”59 The novel starts with a series of catachreses that become alive and are revived in the plot. The castle and the lordship of Otranto constitute the “House” of Alphonso, a place, a name and a family. Alphonso the Great, represented by his sword and helmet, both metonyms of patriarchal power, is himself a part of the House, as is his castle. The castle therefore comes to be haunted with the family secrets of the House of Alphonso, and haunted by the very dead end the catachresis generates: there is no escaping the “House.” The catachresis haunts the text. There is no way out of the House which imprisons the protagonists in its metaphoric derivations, no way out of the literal house which from the start was already the “House” of Alphonso, a dead metaphor. The word “house” haunted by “House” is too small, unable to contain within its semantic walls the endless proliferation of metaphoric derivations. “House” becomes a living dead. The “real owner,” according to the prophecy, “has grown too large to inhabit” the house. The plot develops as the actualization of the dead metaphor. “House” becomes the castle and its recesses, and the family and its secrets. All the actions of the characters and their most secret motivations are in fact determined by a logic that runs counter to the symbolic and in which words have become literal. Thus, the hermit’s cryptic words, which predict that “Alphonso’s blood” will save the maid, call forth the reality of blood ties. Alphonso’s blood

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literally flows in Theodore’s veins. His blood alone can save Isabella. This logic of haunting then explodes the narrative frame of reference.

The Bleeding Nun Language caught in its own traps is also the trigger of action in The Monk. Although apparently ex-centric, the episode of the Bleeding Nun ties together the various narratives. She is the ghost that haunts the nights and the language of all the characters. She herself is a figure of speech, as we have already mentioned. A visual oxymoron, the bride of Christ dressed in the habit that signifies the transcendence of sexuality is nonetheless stained with the blood of physical passion, the blood that reminds us of her womanly nature. Pure and bloody, she is an impossible figure. Chaste and violent, she defies order and logic. Symptomatically, she appears in the text precisely at the point where the text fails, in what could only be a blank, an absence. She is the figurative equivalent of Ambrosio’s coitus, that is, in a way the phallus: Raymond’s narrative of his encounter with the Bleeding Nun intervenes precisely as Ambrosio “sinks upon [Matilda’s] bosom” (109), and ends as he “drew himself from Matilda’s arms” (226). The arms of Matilda, the devil, function like brackets for the supernatural. The supernatural intervenes when language cannot represent the natural world. It is the pointer of a linguistic aporia. Raymond’s narrative introduces the very figure of unrepresentability. But the Nun as oxymoron in fact functions like a broken mirror in the text. It generates echoes, splinters into micro narratives, conditions the lives of all the characters and affects the whole of the plot. Mellerski sees the episode as “a matrix for narrative echoes, reflections and identifications.”60 She reads The Monk as a series of dispersed repetitions of this central episode: “the structure of the text is endlessly perturbed by fragments of Beatrice’s story that echo throughout the course of later events.”61 In fact, traces of the episode precede its own recounting and condition the text from the start, thus demonstrating the Gothic logic of haunting according to which the present is never free from the past, and the younger generations are bound to be revisited by the sins of their fathers. It is the haunting figure of the Bleeding Nun who from the prophetic curse of Agnes in Chapter 2 turns Ambrosio himself into an oxymoron, a carnal monk: Oh! Then, when you yield to impetuous passions; when you feel that man is weak, and born to err; when, shuddering, you look back upon

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your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of God, oh! In that fearful moment think upon me. (72) Ambrosio, even before he actually becomes depraved, is marked linguistically as the impossible fusion of contrary elements: he is both God and the devil. The name “Ambrosio” immediately echoes “ambrosia,” but also comprises the name of the devil, “Ros(ar)io,” whose literal embodiment he is conditioned by the curse to become. If the curse precipitates him into debauchery, his own language triggers his fall. It is his own vows to the devil Matilda which not only break his religious vows but also call forth the haunting of Beatrice whose ghost embodies the ancient literality of language: “Thine, ever thine” murmurs the monk before he sinks upon Matilda’s bosom (109). This triggers Raymond’s misdirected vows of love and, in echo, the matrix of all broken vows— Beatrice’s religious vows and her lover’s false vows of love, which lead her to murder. Raymond faints on the bosom of Beatrice like Ambrosio on the bosom of the devil. Beatrice is an effect of the language of the characters. Agnes makes her haunting possible as she attempts the impossible: the representation of a ghost, of the purely unpresentable. This representation, the drawing becomes presentation when, on May 5, Raymond welcomes in his carriage the spitting image of an image, lamp and dagger included. The drawing itself is nothing but the product of the discourse of the servants. Cunegonde alone “saw the spectre with her own eyes” and “tis from her account that [Agnes] drew the sketch” (154). The supernatural intrudes as a consequence of the literalization of language. Here, pictorial signifiers turn Beatrice into a visual oxymoron. Literally “visible” she is so true to life that she resembles an “animate corse,” a “living dead.” The drawing of the Bleeding Nun overflows the limits of the page to become material reality. Born of language, the ghost is sustained by language when language, seen askance, displays the shadow of the thing rather than the sign for the thing. Words do not happen innocently in the Gothic. Sometimes, the illburied sensible resurges in some signifiers, some fragments of language cut off from the chain of signification. Then, Bleeding Nuns become visible and vows become real ties. Beatrice is the Real in the symbolic. She is the figural. Her presence and presentation in the world of representation is haunting because it supposes the superimposition of two times, two worlds. As she intrudes in the narrative, she taints the present with the faded hues of the immemorial, mythical, gothic past. In this past, language was unmediated language, immediate and literal.

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This past throws its shadows on every utterance and every gesture of the later generations.

Dechronology and family secrets In The Monk, this past invades the text in the form of a vast analepsis, and dechronology empties out the logical articulations of the plot. Thus, Agnes is not simply the double of Beatrice. Her lot is predetermined by the ancient past that feeds on familial superstitions, in the same way as Beatrice’s was. Their common fate is the consequence of the same evil. Beatrice does not explain Agnes retrospectively. Agnes rather seems to throw some light on Beatrice who, we learn, “took the veil at an early age, not by her own choice, but at the express command of her parents” (182). In the same way, Raymond is bound to Agnes by a promise that was made centuries ago.62 His promise to love her is not the sign of his freedom but rather the sign that the past only is the present: “Otto promised that he would be at the Lindenberg hole” and that he would marry Beatrice. (183) Ambrosio himself, although an orphan, is conditioned by the familial past, which seduces him that is to say leads him astray, even before Matilda actually appears as the temptress. Ambrosio is bound to be the depraved monk we discover in the story before the story actually unravels: he is the Marquis de la Cisternas’ cousin. So when he “scoff[s] at [his] monastic vows and load[s] with ridicule the most sacred ceremonies of religion,” he simply actualizes in himself the force of haunting of the family secret. This force is of the nature of a phantomatic signifier, something that is transmitted from parent to child, albeit unconsciously, and furthermore transmitted, without ever having been voiced, from generation to generation. This haunting manifests itself in the way all of the characters, linked by family ties beyond their knowledge, relate to language. Their words are vows, and because they are somehow all connected to the house de la Cisternas, their vows are always in some way or another broken. All vows in the story are bound to be broken before they are uttered. Interestingly, the Wandering Jew or “great Mogul” who voices the original story, the story that seeds all the other stories in the novel and “leaves inflections everywhere in the succeeding pages,”63 is himself the literalization of a mere sign. His power resides in the sign made flesh, that is to say, in the furrow that burns on his brow. He is the embodiment of unmediated language and his narrative of Beatrice’s life is projected against the background of this fantasy of referentiality and pure indexicality. The Bleeding Nun therefore haunts the text

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like the memory of this “other” language, a language of immediacy, a language of pure referentiality and a language from the immemorial past. The narrative of Beatrice’s life comes in excess of the text, and yet holds it together in a series of echoes that reconstruct chronology around different lines, but also conditions the very movements of the characters. As Peter Brooks remarks, at the end of the novel, all of the major characters are impelled to descend into the catacombs of the convent of St. Clare: “it is deep in this multi-layered sepulcher that the climaxes of all the different plots are played out.”64 All of the plots are reduced to one and the same, ultimately. The convent is the womb that gave birth to the Bleeding Nun in Beatrice. It is there that the first vows were broken, there, as a consequence that future words become wounds for generations of La Cisternas. All of the characters are driven unconsciously to “the interdicted regions of the soul,”65 the convent’s burial ground, to confront their Gothic destiny. There the characters discover that they are “other,” another, whose life they are condemned to reenact endlessly, caught as they are in a single instant of ancient time. There they discover the limits to their freedom and individuality, as they are all, in one way or another, the victims of broken vows, even when, like Ambrosio they are the executioners.

An uncanny reading of The Monk A womb and a tomb, the catacombs are not only the place of transgenerational haunting, but also the place of the uncanny that is of the return of the repressed. The text is the veiled expression of the characters’ Unconscious. This Unconscious manifests itself in the interstices of language or in the gaps where meaning is arrested. Desires that one thought buried for good return to haunt the protagonists with images that once were familiar. Peter Brooks reads the emergence of the supernatural in The Monk as “a response to man’s excessive erotic drives” and the Bleeding Nun as “the product” of Raymond and Agnes’ love.66 As the narrative of Beatrice’s life is nested in the embrace between Ambrosio and Matilda,67 she can also be read as Ambrosio’s repressed sexuality. For Ambrosio, the past is not past. The foreclosure of the past makes it impossible for the monk ever to relent and let go of the mother so as to enter the symbolic. Ambrosio was separated from his mother in infancy and brought up in the religious community. In the monastery, Ambrosio was taught to repress the image of the mother, as he was never allowed to think of her or grieve over her loss, that is, to introject her loss. The monks embody the Law of the Father. But this world was imposed on

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Ambrosio without his being able to make a transition towards it. His impossible dialogue and relationship with any love object is symptomatic of the defective formation of his ego. Beatrice, intervening in the narrative precisely where Ambrosio’s coitus should be, embodies in him what he has foreclosed. As a figure of the uncanny, she functions like the Sand Man of Hoffmann’s story. She appears as a disturber of love and intervenes when fulfillment seems possible precisely to undermine it. The supernatural is a derivation of the erotic, and the Nun, like the Sand Man, is a figure of castration. She is Medusa and “there was something petrifying in her regard” (170). Her gaze exhibits in an apotropaic manner the fear she inflicts in her victims: her eyes “seemed endowed with the property of the rattlesnake” (170). She emasculates Raymond who, on seeing her, faints: “the blood which had been frozen in my veins rushed back to my heart with violence; I uttered a deep groan and sunk lifeless upon my pillow” (171). She also clearly deflates Ambrosio’s potency: “his heart was despondent.” The intrusion of the supernatural marks a threat to the formation of the ego. The uncanny “is the dimension that blocks the fulfillment of our subjectivity,” Dolar explains.68 “It confronts us with the parts of ourselves that we have denied or disowned but cannot entirely expunge,” according to Morris.69 The uncanny appears as that which resists the symbolic. This is why, for instance, in The Monk, the Nun is an oxymoron. The oxymoron goes against the most basic rule of oppositional language, uniting as it does opposites in a single phrase. The supernatural therefore participates in the subversion of language systematically undertaken by the Gothic where catachreses and metaphors are taken at face value and where language is literalized, recovering the materiality it lost in the process of symbolization. In figural moments when chaos takes over meaning, and when the madness of language brings back the body or the sensible in the system, then, we again return to the forgotten times of a-dualism. The uncanny is the underside of the symbolic. It always takes us back, with the fantasies it develops or the way it warps time, space and communication, to the maternal, to something outside language.

A Gothic reading: Abjection (Kristeva) The symbolic can only function as long as a series of barriers has been elaborated between the subject and the world. Language marks the clear-cut separation of subject and object, inside and outside, and the entry into the symbolic can only be completed if the subject accepts

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these various forms of separation. The Bleeding Nun, the figure of the uncanny, erases the limit between two worlds: that of the living of which the subject is part and that of the dead, literally ob-jected, thrown out of the subject. The living and the dead are no longer understood in a system of mutually exclusive opposites. The fantastic subverts the system by challenging the notion of clear-cut oppositions and blurring boundaries. The uncanny, Cixous writes, is what resists classification: [it] is the between that is tainted with strangeness . . . What is intolerable is that the ghost or vampire erases the limit that exists between two states. Neither alive, nor dead, passing through, the dead man returns in the manner of the repressed. It is his coming back that makes the ghost what he is, just as it is the return of the Repressed that inscribes the repression.70 As the “between” tainted with strangeness which returns like an undead, the uncanny recalls the abject defined by Kristeva as the state in between object and subject, the stage when the subject, not yet a subject, has not completed its separation from the body of the mother. The abject, Kristeva explains, corresponds to the first efforts of the future subject to separate itself from the pre-Oedipal mother. Nausea, distaste and horror are the signs of a radical revulsion, which serves to create a fragile sense of “I” where before there was nothing. Predating repression, which supposes the existence of a constituted subject, there are moves to separate from the mother as matter and materiality. A body must separate from another body in order to be a “proper” self, “one’s own, and one’s clean self.” The entrance in the symbolic corresponds to the elaboration of borders and limits to separate the subject from what is not subject. This process entails violence and pain. Remainders of this tearing away out of which a subject is born into language still live obscurely in us. Predating the formation of our Unconscious, the memory of the violence reemerges in moments where frontiers collapse. The expulsion can only be violent at a stage where the not-yet constituted subject is both inside and outside, the same and other, mother and child. Moments of bodily revulsion, for instance bring back in us the immemorial memory of the archaic motions of abjection: “Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrust me to the side and turn me away from defilement or sewage.”71 Not me, not that. “Blood—especially menstrual blood—nail clippings, hair, bodily waste, etc., which render the boundary of the body indistinct and ambiguous”

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are abject.72 For Kristeva, the abject has to do mainly with the maternal body and the semiotic. The association between the abject, the feminine and the maternal appears clearly in The Monk, where the subterranean crypt of the convent concentrates all the desire and the horror liberated in the novel. The crypt is like the underskirt of the convent, a hidden private world, which looks like a womb with its dark corridors and recesses. It is there that magic, a preverbal form of subjective omnipotence, can be exercised, there that Ambrosio’s sexual fantasies must reach their climax, there that dead babies linger. It is the secret place that Lorenzo must penetrate in order to be educated into manhood. The catacombs are the exact equivalent of female genitals. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud writes: It often happens that male patients declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place however is the entrance to the former “heim” of all human beings.73 The various fantasies that are played out in the underground of the convent, whether of live burial or rape or necrophilia, send us back to this former “heim,” the place of indifferentiation where blood, life and death were intimately mingled. “There is too much death in life and too much life in death . . . There is no recourse to an outside/inside” in the place of inorganic bliss that had to be seen as “unheimlich” for survival: the tomb is always a womb, and a womb can only be the tomb where the subject loses him/herself.74 The catacombs are the spatial equivalent of the Bleeding Nun, and it is in this place that the parallel between Beatrice and the other characters becomes most obvious. There, Agnes is condemned to death in life, as if to mirror the life in death of the ghost she impersonated. Agnes and Beatrice are the two sides of the same coin. They are the feminine of which the maternal in Kristeva’s terms “is the real support.”75 In them, sexuality verges on horror. The “other” who, like a ghost, intrudes in the protective shell of the subject and threatens to castrate him and forever condemn him to the world of passivity is the feminine. The sphere of the maternal, not quite repressed, is the true ghost of the Gothic. When faced both with the Bleeding Nun and then the dying nun, Agnes, Lorenzo and Raymond betray similar reactions, as if to show that woman (Beatrice, the passionate lover) and mother (Agnes holding the corpse of her dead infant) are one and the same. Raymond’s “limbs were

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chained in second infancy” (172). He “sunk lifeless upon his pillow” (171). This regressive loss of control clearly shows that horror is linked to primary stages of the formation of the “I,” when “I” was not yet “I,” not separate from the maternal world of total abandonment. Lorenzo’s discovery of Agnes in the tomb-womb also leaves him “petrified with horror” and “sick at heart” (355). The abject spectacle of the maternal awakens ancient feelings of revulsion and provokes a gut reaction like nausea, like the first moves to expel the body of the mother from the not yet clear limits of the bodily self. Furthermore, Lorenzo loses his capacity to speak, as if the experience was preverbal and projected the subject back to his infancy. The body of Agnes, mingled with the corpse of the infant is “death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not in fact part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object.”76 Decaying flesh and blood, the maternal haunts the world of the subject like the memory of the impossible world, our first “heim.” It is the same decaying flesh and blood that haunts Raymond when he comes face to face with the undead corpse of Beatrice. She bleeds with her sexual difference and is the abject of menstrual blood that returns to mar the hero’s future prospects of marriage and condition his sexuality. On the other side, the symbolic side, woman is not a motherly figure. Woman is disembodied and idealized. She is Virginia, Lorenzo’s consolation prize. Virginia is the antidote to the Bleeding Nun. Right from the start she has her place in the social construct as bride-to-be: a tender and caring woman, her very name conditions her being. She represents the symbolic adequation of virginity and womanhood. She is what Antonia could no longer be as soon as she became flesh in Ambrosio’s eyes. She is what Agnes, the anti-Madonna, pressing her dead baby on her bosom, never was, namely a motherly woman yet not a womb, a woman without blood. Lorenzo’s relationship with Virginia is codified, socially acceptable and grounded in repression. Ambrosio’s relationships with women, on the other hand, cannot be grounded only in repression, because Ambrosio never fully went through the process of separation from the maternal. As “one who is outwardly beyond reproach and yet secretly getting away with murder,” Ambrosio embodies the very idea of the abject.77 The following quote from Powers of Horror deserves to be quoted fully as it describes to the word Ambrosio’s character: The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior . . . Any crime, because it

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draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.78 Sanctimonious, over-righteous and blasphemous, Ambrosio blurs the limits between good and bad in his double-faced nature. His crimes, rape and matricide, clearly link him to the world of the abject feminine. The mother is his “non-abjected non-object.” He is the subject caught in his own pre-history. That he never existed as a separate entity, but rather remained part of the pre-Oedipal dyad mother–child is evident from his very name. Ambrosio, as we already mentioned, contains Ro(sar)io in his name like a crypt, and Rosario is the spitting image of the mother, of Madonna. Ambrosio was thrown into the community of brothers and fathers while yet unaware of his own limits. Prematurely cut off from the breast and the body of the mother, trapped in a frozen moment of total narcissistic blurring and yet plunged in the symbolic, he becomes the depraved monk, a preacher, the best among them, and a sinner, at home and yet not at home in the law of the fathers and in the social order it reflects. Although he and Beatrice are never situated on the same diegetic level, she haunts him with all the power of the unpresentable. She is the shadow of the Virgin Mother, the part in her that cannot become a symbol and remains unrepresentable. The Bleeding Nun is the undead mother preserved in him. She hovers over the crypt where she lies, unburied because not introjected. This mother cannot be put into signifiers. She predates the entry into the symbolic. Fantasmatically, Ambrosio has never lost his mother. Cutting though the narrative of his sexual intercourse with Matilda, the “unheimlich” episode of the Bleeding Nun shows that Ambrosio never left “the entrance of the former ‘heim’ of all human beings” to go back to Freud’s formulation.79 Beatrice lying unburied in the Lidenberg-hole is the pre-Oedipal mother, non-abjected, buried in him, beyond retrieval. She is the clue to his fantasy of incorporation, which he reenacts on Agnes and Antonia. Both are condemned to live burials, incorporated, undead, preserved and yet kept away from indiscreet eyes in the catacombs. Elvira’s death

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also becomes a necessary moment in the fantasy. She must die so as to preserve the dead-undead mother in the crypt. Although she is Ambrosio’s biological mother, Elvira disturbs the compromise of the subject. She is the symbolic mother (the mother in the symbolic) who would replace the semiotic mother. She forbids him access to the world of his desires and advocates repression. She therefore must disappear so that the mother in the crypt, the non-object of a non-subject, can remain intact. But Agnes’ sacrifice disrupts the uncontainable compromise, as she becomes, in her ordeal, not the embodiment of the horrible matter-mother, but a symbolic figure of redemption and a suffering Madonna. Buried alive, the undead maternal ultimately becomes either death, as is the case with Antonia, or life in the case of Agnes who disrupts and escapes the crypt.

The Gothic and melancholy The world of the living dead is the fantasy world of the melancholy subject that cannot accept the reality of death and refuses to bury the object of his/her desire or, in the case of The Monk, the pre-objectal mother. Melancholy with its fantasies of preservation, of magic restoration or incorporation precludes language and symbolic constructions. It draws the subject irresistibly to the immemorial past of his/her “unconstitution.” In Stranded Objects, Santner sums up Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholy as follows. Mourning happens when an object that one has loved for its intrinsic qualities as separate and distinct from the self is lost. The pleasures that one derives from this form of love depend on a capacity to tolerate the potentially painful awareness that “I” and “you” have “hard edges.” In melancholy, Santner continues, “the self lacks sufficient strength and cohesion to tolerate, much less comprehend the reality of separateness.”80 The melancholic is a primary narcissist or an infant, living in a space, or a non-space, where “I” is “you.” The uncanny is the place where hard edges no longer exist, when something is “heim” to the point of being “unheim,” and this place is the place we all inhabited, our first “heim” that we had to see as “unheim” so as to survive as social beings. The shadow of the maternal always haunts us. It is this shadow that haunts the fantastic text. The body of the mother is the undead of language. It sometimes resurges to disrupt and contaminate symbolic constructions with the memory of what we had to give up in order to fit in the system. “I am thine” and “thou art mine,” says the ghost of Beatrice. These vows resound with

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all the materiality of primary attachments, when “I” was not “I,” and “you” not “you,” when boundaries were blurred in a-dualistic bliss. The traditional Gothic plot reverts to the moments where hard edges were brittle. It offers renewed and repeated instances of an unstable “I.” It shows the underside of the symbolic. Endlessly pursued along dark corridors, gothic heroines stumble upon corpses and are haunted by stubborn ghosts that point to times immemorial. Maybe this immemorial past is the once familiar and now forgotten life before language and socialization, when there were no boundaries, no subject and no object. Melancholy crypts and regressive fantasies might well be what hollows out language in the Gothic.

4 The Melancholy Crypt of Frankenstein

And then I can feel at the tip of my tongue the angular cut of a shattered cut. —Derrida, Fors, 115 A statue hides the entrance to the catacombs in The Monk, and a tapestry mimics the secret of past events in The Mysteries of Udolpho. In Frankenstein, a painting might well hold the key to the text. It is not a swiveling painting in the tradition of Gothic paraphernelia, which would simply hide the entrance to secret passages. It is a painting exhibited over the mantelpiece, and it harbors within its frame the entrance to a forbidden and unfathomable phantasmatic crypt. The painting represents the text’s central thematic tableau: a scene of mourning as the inaugural moment of the House of the Frankensteins. Caroline Frankenstein née Beaufort is kneeling by her father’s coffin. Yet this scene of mourning turns out to be a pure artifice, “a melancholy fetish reeking of morbid disavowal,”1 suggesting that Frankenstein must be read symptomatically as a pathological refusal to let the dead die. Recentering the text around the swiveling hinge of mourning and melancholy, this chapter attempts a “cryptonymic” reading of Frankenstein along the lines of Abraham and Torok’s work. Here, the notions of cryptonym and cryptophore in particular will be explored further as crucial to the understanding of the Gothic element in the text. Victor’s narrative of the creation of a monster will be exposed as the linguistic encipherment and encryption of a fantasy to preserve the dead alive in a crypt within the self. Hiding a secret in a transparent narrative is a dominant impulse in fiction writing as is the instinct in the reader to break the hermeneutic code while reading for clues. In “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), 89

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James’s fictitious author, Hugh Vereker, expresses his disappointment with the critics who invariably fail to discover the motivating principle and ultimate meaning of his work: There is an idea in my work. [. . .] It stretches, this little trick of mine from book to book, and everything else comparatively plays over the surface of it [. . .] The thing is as concrete as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap. [. . .] It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every comma.2 Like the figure in the carpet, a text hides a secret. But the secret does not necessarily belong to the order of signification. The omnipresent yet unfigurable figure in the carpet may point to another order of meaning, to a materiality of the text that is usually excluded from the discourse, excommunicated. In James’s formula, it inhabits “commas” and “dots.” Punctuation consists of perfunctory signifiers that support the linguistic structure and yet occupy a marginal place of oversight in textual interpretation. These marks of the text nonetheless are like “the string that the pearls” of meaning “are strung on,” in Vereker’s own account. Without the string, there can be no text. “The Figure in the Carpet” invites us to read awry, with free-floating attention, to stumble on the coded rather than the codified in the text. In the laterality of the text something is being said and yet not signified. Meaning can hide in non-signifying elements and is no longer the end product of the process of signification. Two parallel streams seem to run in the text. In the linearity of the narrative, a message is communicated. But in the interstices of the narrative, in the silences, pauses and commas, the density of a figure that remains excommunicated arrests the flow of reading. The narrative surface, Vereker suggests, is only a pretext for an unsayable and unsaid idea that secretly works and burrows its way through the text. Some texts, paradoxically, may have been created for the sole purpose of hiding words or secrets that must remain beyond reach. Frankenstein also hides such a figure in its complex texture and, pursuing the paradox a little further, one could show that the embedded narratives that constitute the novel work as a pretext for another text, laterally inscribed in the stories told by the three main narrators. The assumption that a text contains signifiers that, deprived of their communicative power, must be treated as objects and read as rebuses, or figures in the carpet, is the keystone of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of cryptonymy developed in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word. Cryptonymy is a verbal procedure leading to the creation of a text

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whose purpose is to contain secretly words that must remain beyond reach. A cryptonym is a word that hides another word that must never be uttered. The key word, no doubt unutterable for some reason . . . would have to be polysemic, expressing multiple meanings through a single phonetic structure. One of these would remain shrouded, but the other, or several other meanings . . . would be stated through distinct phonetic structures, that is, through synonyms.3 A cryptonymic reading consists in joining the linguistic elements of the text with the part of them that has, for some reason, been enshrouded. Reading, in Abraham’s terms, performs a symbolic operation. It consists in joining the symbol and its co-symbol. In analysis, meaning is not given. Only symbols are given. Symbols are “data that are missing an as yet undetermined part, but that can in principle be determined.”4 We only read lacunae, half complete phonetic or semantic elements, which, reunited with their missing complements, would signify a scene or a trauma that must be kept out of circulation. The missing part is the co-symbol. Of the co-symbol, the analyst knows nothing. But paying attention to the line of fracture, the material aspect and the jagged edges of the given piece, the symbol, and hunting for traces of displacement in the word, one can reconstitute the co-symbol, in the manner of a puzzle. “Reading,” Abraham explains, “is deciphering the inscription left by the differment or displacement of the symbol,” that is to say the missing part of a linguistic unit, “and the retracing of the steps towards earlier sources of signification that lie beyond perception.”5 A cryptonymic reading therefore requires that one take language literally and concentrate on its material aspect. In Frankenstein, a cryptonymic reading, exploring allosemic, homophonic and synonymic distortions, points to usually unaccounted for areas of silence. The text is indeed coded and hides in its recesses a secret. Although the very structure of the text and its narrative line suggest that it is a text with a secret buried in the folds of its embedded narratives, the enigma does not lie where it is expected to reside. Far from covering up a monster as its ensconced unspeakable, Frankenstein conceals behind such a narrative pretext a genuinely unreachable secret. In the interstices of meaning, a drama is being played which goes against the grain of the narrative line. On this other stage mutely figured in the density of the text, the monster is not Victor’s secret, and Victor’s secret, on the other hand, turns out not to be his own. A cryptonymic

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reading will unbury a melancholic crypt in the text, a monument for an unmournable, denied death. But Victor’s crypt does not simply shelter his own lost and incorporated object, as a melancholic crypt would. It harbors a secret phantom, the illegitimate object of another, unknown to the melancholy self: that of the inhabitant of the crypt, Victor’s unmourned, undead mother. An unstated event that lies beyond or rather before the scope of the drama’s action returns to haunt the text and the main protagonist, Victor, the phantom carrier. “The silence, gap or secret of someone else ‘speaks in the manner of a ventriloquist’ through the words and acts (readable as words) of the subject.”6 The phantom is transmitted from one generation to the next, from parent to child or from community to individual without ever having been voiced. In Frankenstein, it forces its way in aberrant actions and symptoms for which Victor cannot truly take responsibility.

A fantasy of incorporation: The melancholic crypt Frankenstein is a gothic text, that is to say a text haunted by the sins of the parents. P. B. Shelley’s 1818 normalizing “Preface” to Frankentein is, at the outskirts of the text, the first indication that a secret lies buried between the lines of the text.7 Surely the urbane tone of his assertion can only arouse suspicion: the purpose of Mary Shelley’s text cannot, in the context of a ghost story competition, simply be “the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence of universal virtue” (14). Mary Shelley’s own “Introduction” to Frankenstein (1831), also functions in turn as a protective fence. It encircles the text in a logical frame, but in doing so, it points precisely to the enormous and monstrous secret it pretends to channel. If the preface hides what the text holds, the introduction holds what the text hides. Yet the Introduction never betrays the buried secret. It presents or “pre-serves,” and at the same time, like a crypt, preserves the text, to use Derrida’s comment on his own foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word.8 As the first piece of the narrative fabric, the preface preserves the unstated layer of the text. It displaces the question of the genesis of Frankenstein and exposes how a young woman came to think up such a story rather than why she explored the idea. The concatenation of factual elements that contributed to the creation of the text describes the wiring and connections but carefully avoids the trigger that produced the impulse. If indeed “everything must have a beginning . . . and that beginning must be linked to something that went before,” Mary Shelley, in spite of her protestations of transparency, hushes what came before the

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acknowledged beginning. Unlike the “Hindoos” of her example, she gives her work “an elephant to support it,” namely a series of causes such as family and personal influences. But she does not “make the elephant stand upon a tortoise” (169). “I began that day with the words It was on a dreary night in November, making a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream” (171). This is not a true beginning and the “transcript” carefully avoids the crypt, except in the distant lingering echo that the word generates. Yet a trace, a clue towards the originary chaos before the beginning of the narrative forces its way through the rational enterprise of the 1831 introduction. A word comes loose, uncontrolled. A jarring element, heterogeneous to the structure of the discourse of the text points to areas left silent by the logical argumentation. Repeatedly, obsessively, rhythmically, “hideous” returns, “like the linguistic remnant of a repression . . . altered so as to void any perceivable lexical attachment to what must remain unspoken.”9 And, together with “hideous,” the verb “to hide”—visually encrypted in the adjective—returns, to make manifest semantic lies. “Hideous” functions as a magic word precisely because in the same movement it gives and withdraws the information. It is both the revelation of all the possible words and sensations hidden in “hideous” and the secret desire “to hide” the cryptonym while pointing to it. In order to find the crypt in language, one needs to “read writing as a system of expressive traces.”10 Another layer of text pierces through in the possible displacement from “hideous” to its still unreadable host word or “co-symbol.” The introduction of 1831 puts forth a word that both keeps the secret hidden and signals its presence. Furthermore, it also silently mimes the traumatic scenography at the core of the text. From “so hideous an idea” (167) to “hideous phantasm” (170) and from “hideous corpse” (170) to “hideous progeny” (171), it invites a reading of the text as the staging of a fantasy of incorporation. The stumbling block in Frankenstein is the scandal of death, and the stone hidden in the name of the main character, Franken-stein, also designates a tomb of a special type in which a “corpse” becomes “progeny,” that is to say in which the dead are fantastically kept alive, reborn. Several critics have noted the link in the narrative structure between the death of the mother and the birth of the monster. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, for instance, shows how the ideal of symmetry displayed in the various embedded narrations is also reflected in the parallel series of narrative “births” and narrative “deaths,” that is in the rigorously balanced order of appearance and disappearance of the characters.11 Yet, three anomalies stand out disrupting the pattern. If the survival of Walton and the elimination of Frankenstein before the monster’s exit

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from the narrative are required by the narrative logic, the premature death of the mother—long before any other death and directly followed by the birth of the monster—stands out as the intrusion of chaos in a regulated construct. Although this gap undeniably seems to call for Oedipal interpretations, it is also the telltale sign of an anomaly in the process of mourning and a defect in the mechanism.12 In the same way as “hideous corpse” in the 1831 introduction becomes “hideous progeny” in the novel, the mother’s corpse is directly connected with the newborn creature, and a dead person becomes undead. In the warped and pathological structure of melancholy, a lacuna, a loss is denied and a corpse kept alive. As Abraham and Torok explain: Grief that cannot be expressed builds a secret vault within the subject. In the crypt reposes—alive, reconstituted from the memories of words, images and feelings—the objective counterpart of the loss as a complete person with his or her topography as well as the incidents—real or imagined—that made introjection impossible.13 The structural fissure between the death of Caroline and the birth of a monster who must remain nameless, like an anonymous tomb, corresponds to the erection of the melancholic crypt; the loved one is mummified and secretly hidden in a private unattainable area of the Self. That Victor does not accept the scandal of death clearly appears in the series of delays and denials that constitute the story of his life. Lethargic, indifferent to the world, prone to self-reproach, Victor displays all the symptoms of clinical melancholy. After the death of Caroline, he can neither leave nor return. To leave home for Ingolstadt means to be separated from an essentially maternal universe, but to return also proves impossible once home has become “the house of mourning” (54). Victor, who cannot grieve over a death he has magically canceled, and therefore cannot accept his father’s invitation to “enter the house of mourning,” delays his arrival after William’s death. In the same way, he is bound to postpone his wedding with Elizabeth and even to deny its actuality in a logically fallacious scene of murder that betrays his perverse sense of time. Victor’s narration of the tragic events of his wedding night seems conveniently to invert the more plausible chronological sequence. In his account, events happen in the following order: first, “I heard a shrill and dreadful scream” then “my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended, I could feel the blood trickling in my veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs” and finally “I rushed into the room” (144). The whole

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sequence forms an extended hysteron proteron. In other words when read from back to front, from “I rushed into the room” to “I heard a shrill and dreadful scream,” it clearly depicts the various stages of a murder perpetrated by Victor alone. But the chronological inversion in the account of the tragic events does not so much signify the denial of the homicide itself as the denial of the wedding per se. The real threat lurking behind the prospect of the wedding night is not so much the curse of the monster or the fear that Victor might get arrested if he does not have an alibi. The risk for the protagonist is to acknowledge his mother’s death in honoring her last wish—that he marry Elizabeth. To marry Elizabeth would indeed mean to “enter the house of mourning” and therefore truly to bury the mother. But she is not dead, and the proof, as Rickels notices, is that Victor does not find her tomb in the family plot when he last visits the graveyard before his long voyage to the end of the world: “I found myself at the entrance of the cemetery where William, Elizabeth and my father reposed” (149).14 Symptomatically omitted from the list of the cherished dead, the mother is not yet granted eternal rest. The denial of the loss is the transparent sign of a perverse disease of mourning. A fantasy of incorporation is substituted for impossible introjection. Introjection is traditionally defined as the process by which grief is overcome through the gradual replacement of the lost object by signs that symbolize it. It is the act that consists of putting the original void into words. Introjection occurs when death can be related and when the use of past tenses opens up the prospect of future healing. To introject a wish, a grief, or a situation is, in Abraham’s formula, “to dispose of it through language in a communion of empty mouths.”15 Melancholy is precisely born of an impossibility to condole, condone and acquiesce in the symbolic murder that accompanies the act of symbolisation: the subject must renounce and suspend the reality of the object if he/she wants to speak about it. The melancholic refuses symbolization. The presence of a word cannot replace the absence of the object. Unable to let go of the loved object, the melancholic resorts to a fantasy: the object is literally incorporated in the subject, lodged in a false unconscious, kept away from indiscreet eyes. Incorporation de-metaphorizes language and takes introjection at face value: if to mourn is to digest or swallow up the loss in Abraham and Torok’s phrase, incorporation in return ingests and swallows the object itself. Taking literally what mourning does figuratively, the melancholic obtains nourishment not from words but from an imaginary object incorporated within the Self.

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In Frankenstein, the lost object becomes nourishment. The frequent reference to Victor’s “gnashing teeth” at the thought or mention of the monster is a clear symptom that the nameless “filthy mass” exists in defiance of the paternal injection to mourn the dead. The text relishes in food metaphors, vampiristic allusions and necrophilic suggestions. The monster, for instance, is a mouth feeding on death, a vampire who “will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of [Victor’s] remaining friends” (75). The lost object, more edible than Oedipal, keeps Victor’s mind absorbed in a totally regressive world. In the original version of the text, Victor clearly stated that the monster was a libidinal creation: “I wished as it were,” he said, “to procrastinate my feelings of affection until the great object of my affection was completed.”16 “Feelings of affection” become “object of affection,” thus betraying the direction of the protagonist’s cathectic libido. But the way the birth of the monster creates a status quo in the subject is expressed in the corrected version of the passage. P. B. Shelley’s heavy-handed editing unexpectedly stresses the dominant mechanisms in Victor’s melancholia: “I wished as it were to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object which swallowed up every habit of my nature should be completed” (41). This clearly introduces the image of incorporation in the text: the creation of the monster has to do with “swallowing up.” Incorporation magically allows Victor to “procrastinate.” Death is put at bay and the confrontation with reality postponed. Feelings of affection are absorbed in the object of affection. The monster is the end result of these feelings. The magic lies in the result: there is a monster, and there no longer is a need to deal with one’s feelings. The object, the monster, is made up of dead elements, pieces of corpses and dead tissues. It is life that emerges from death. It is the subject’s response to the scandal of death: creation erases destruction. Death never happened because there is now, in the body of the creature, a place where all-absorbing life triumphs. This body, this place is the vault in which Victor buries the great object kept alive for his most secret pleasure. It is only in this vault and from this vault that love can be. Thus, Elizabeth, as Anne Mellor remarks, becomes an object of desire only when she dies.17 She must penetrate the magic circle where the dead are kept alive and the living are dead, in order to become the love object, part of the great object. As Rickels puts it, she “enters the melancholic embrace only when she becomes a corpse superimposable onto the dead mother,” that is to say when she is ingested and incorporated in the intrapsychic vault.18

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Thus, in a secret vault within the Self and yet hidden from the Self and the outside world, a vault very much like “a solitary chamber or rather cell at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase” (44), or very much like the rib cage of a humanoid in which a heart is kept beating, Victor recreates “the objective counterpart of the loss as a complete person.”19 The monster, old before it is young and dead before it is alive, is the product of the displacement or misplacement of a corpse.20 Created from the chaos of death, it configures the installation of the inaccessible object of desire in a safe, within and yet beside the Self, walled in and yet unapproachable and forbidden. The force of this secret crumples the text and haunts the discourse in the form of visual echoes, puns and rebuses. The often-quoted anachronistic pun, “a mummy again endued with animation,” is only one example of how the heterogeneous space of the treasured secret perforates the homogeneous narrative.21 “A mummy again” voices the exultant triumph of the melancholic. But traces of the perverse process are disseminated throughout the text forcing new meanings into the signifiers. For instance, when the narrator contemplates with horror “the form of the monster on whom [he] had bestowed existence” (46), a shadow comes before the eyes of the reader and becomes manifest beneath the clear surface of the verb. Cradled and burrowed in “bestow” is the secret: the monster is a pretext carefully hiding its true motivation. Victor has locked up existence in his monster, “be-stowed” and “best-stowed,” put away for safekeeping a life, while seemingly giving birth to the creature. The scientific experiment is a frame behind which something more important takes place. Locked up within the verb, and behind words, is a shrine for the object of desire. The monster, like a protective shell around the secret, is what Derrida, in his foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word would call the cement or concrete on the outer wall of the crypt. Like “stow” in “bestowed,” the crypt is included in the self, incorporated, yet separated from all the other apartments or compartments in the self. Engulfed it must also be expelled, like “an outcast outside inside the inside,” to quote Derrida’s cryptic formula.22 Typically, the monster hidden in the workshop of filthy creation becomes a “wretch,” that is, etymologically an outcast. Hidden and yet rejected, the “hideous monster” or “hideous wretch” perfectly describes the unsustainable oxymoronic position of the melancholic crypt which “protects from the outside the very secret of its clandestine inclusion or its internal exclusion.”23 Lodged within the self and yet without, inaccessible, the crypt is not part of the topography. Its constitution corresponds rather

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to the elaboration in the subject of a false Unconscious, an “inclusion” in Abraham’s terminology in which the mechanism of “preservative repression” replaces the repression at work in the subject. Preservative repression allows the subject at the same time to repress the desire for the object and to preserve the memory of the loved one. Both repulsive and secretly enjoyed, the monster allegorizes the formation of an impossible vault in which to hide an impossible desire. Incorporation in the hidden crypt reactivates in the subject primitive beliefs in restorative magic. Fantastic, unmediated and immediate, the fantasy of incorporation has a lot in common with galvanism and electrical experiments. For Victor, the solution to the problem of life comes as a miracle: “from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon [him], a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, he was surprised . . . that he alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret” (39). In a flash of time, in the winking of an eye, the subject has the power to reanimate the dead object miraculously “lodged like a prosthesis, a graft in the heart of an organ within the divided self.”24 In a flash of light, the dead can be resuscitated and organs can suddenly be brought back to life by machines and electric shocks. Mary Shelley cites Galvani’s experiments as a direct source of inspiration for her story. “Animal electricity” circulating through nerves and tissues seems to create a network of communication and to entice a response in the corpse. Between the body of the mourner, the machine and the lifeless corpse, desire and warmth can be exchanged. In an instant, electricity fills in the breach left gaping between the subject and the dead other. Mellor shows how the novel reflects the scientific craze of its age. The Shelleys knew of and discussed Professor Aldini’s experiences during which the eyes and mouth of a dead ox “connected by an arc of metal wires to a pile of copper and zinc plates were seen to open.”25 Avital Ronell, in an entry in The Telephone Book, quotes the autobiography of another mourner and fervent electricity enthusiast of electricity, Thomas A. Watson. This text sheds some light on Victor’s fantastic world. Watson’s unmournable dead is a pet, a cat unduly scythed from the realm of the living. To mitigate the grief of the young boy, “an ingenious friend stuffed and mounted the skin.” But the frightful result does not bring consolation. What the moths left of the fur of the mummy in the course of time, Watson uses “as an exciter for a frictional electric machine.”26 The same cause produces the same effect. Openly recognized as a failure, the desire to keep the dead alive finds satisfaction in the magic of an electric experiment only. However horrible and patchy the “mummy endued with life,” it is the source

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of intense kinetic pleasure: to touch, rub and electrify the skin. Static electricity and animal electricity grant the forbidden pleasure. The great object of Frankenstein’s affection, like Watson’s is skin: his own skin and his “mommy’s” skin miraculously reconnected by the complex system of wires and cross-wires or, in the case of Victor, a complex scientific machinery that remains explicitly vague. “The blood trickling in the veins” and “the tingling in the extremities of the limbs” of Victor (145) allude to the primary source of satisfaction, the secret circulation of pleasure like a fluid in the nerves, under the skin. Skin is the surface that allows an interface with the mother of infancy. Skin is the first sense one gets of one’s identity through contact with the mother, and skin is also the first source of pleasure the child must relent to to grow into an independent subject. One is reminded of Didier Anzieu’s fundamental concept of “ego-skin,” which answers the need for a narcissistic envelope as a condition of well-being. An intermediary structure of the psychic apparatus, the “ego-skin” corresponds to sense of the ego as a body ego that precedes the psychic construction of the subject.27 Pleasure is hidden in the skin, and skin is the deepest layer in the cryptonymic “hideous” which recurs like a clue in the introduction to Frankenstein (1831). Victor’s melancholic crypt, like so many melancholy crypts is padded with skin, the site of regressive pleasure. Hideous refers indeed to the ugliness of the monster and of its creation. Furthermore, obviously, hideous also conceals in its semantic folds the verb “to hide.” But beneath the verb “to hide,” that beacon, marking the place of a secret, lies “a hide,” the soft skin of a mother, the source of the first happiness. The complex network of forbidden homophonic resonances crystallizes in the appearance of the monster. His “yellow skin” which “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath,” his “shrivelled complexion” and “straight black lips” (42) are constant reminders that he was created primarily so as to try and erase the shock of death with an electric shock, and so that Victor could be “in touch” with the object of his desire. Symptomatically, the skin of the monster does not conceal interior workings. The skin, as a consequence, both hides and reveals its connection with the secret entombed in the subject. Like the secret it hides, it is both inside and outside, present and absent, accessible and not. Buried with the object in the crypt padded with skin is also the skin disease that entailed, in the objective world that the subject has eliminated, the loss of the object. Caroline Beaufort died of scarlet fever. The shriveled complexion and black lips are reminders of the rash that took her from the realm of the living and made it necessary for her son to preserve her undead in himself.

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In the melancholic crypt, the subject magically wired to the dead other can reactivate intimate contact while turning a deaf ear to the calls of mourning and to the language of loss. Gathering up “pieces-of-the mother,” the subject regresses to undividedness or to what Abraham calls “pathological dual unity.”28 “In this locus of primary bliss, the melancholic is enveloped in the mother’s sphere where there can be no distinction of her conscious from her unconscious emanation.”29 The carrier of the crypt, unable to become “not mother,” necessarily also incorporates the mother’s unconscious. He preserves the unsaid and unsayable of his lost object. A non-spoken is transmitted as a lacuna or repressed knowledge. As a secret, which is communicated without ever having been revealed, it can only function incognito as a ventriloquist, as a stranger in relation to the subject’s own psychic topology.30 The crypt preserves the secret and the repressed material of another. The crypt contains a phantom, that is, an unspeakable secret silently transmitted to the cryptophore. In the middle of the night, the phantom of the crypt may come to haunt the keeper of the graveyard, making strange and incomprehensible signs to him, forcing him to perform unwanted acts, arousing unexpected feelings in him.31 If indeed the essence of the Gothic lies in the transgenerational transmission of “the sins of the fathers,” Mary Shelley’s text forces us to reconsider the way the secret sins of the fathers haunt their descendants. They literally inhabit the discourses of the younger generations rather than visit their fearful imaginations. Frankenstein harbors phantom narratives.

A narrative in excess: Victor ventriloquizes his mother’s secret In the same way that the monster is not contemporary with itself, the secret in the crypt is not contemporary with the crypt. Victor’s life scenario is literally haunted by enscripted traumatic events that occurred before the events he narrates. Victor, like Perceval, is spoken through, as if haunted by the voice of someone else: “groans and cries ring in [his] ears” (136). Like Wolfson, his script is multilingual.32 The narrative

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structure of this epistolary novel which puts forth several voices and narrators conversant in various languages (Walton is English, Frankenstein speaks French and the Monster learns French with an Arabic girl) clearly suggests the idea of a “babelized” text, condemned to speak in foreign tongues. The image is actually inscribed in the text as the medallion containing Caroline’s picture circulates, like a coded message from character to character. It is a trinket, a “bauble” (which derives etymologically from the word Babel), from the mother as well as a signifier for “mother” which circulates among the various children, from Elizabeth to William to Justine. Foreign languages and the art of translating are frequently alluded to in the novel. At the heart of the monster’s narrative, the story of Safie and more particularly of Safie’s mother is inscribed in French. Clerval studies Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and Victor studies in Germany and goes to Scotland. Patronymics also combine several languages. Translating and decoding are thus tasks discretely assigned to the reader of Frankenstein. Victor himself unexpectedly gives out a possible clue for translation in a slip of the tongue: “I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed deeds beyond description horrible, and much more (I persuaded myself) was yet behind” (67).33 The language of the phantom, which intrudes in the narrative and yet alludes to events outside its scope, is a dead language, the language of other times. But the message also manifests itself visually, in physical symptoms that suddenly inhabit Victor’s body. Each major crisis leaves the hero both feverish and totally unable to express himself: his “lips and throat were parched” (63), his “skin was parched with the heat of fever” (145). A secret disease that must remain mute is inscribed on Victor’s body as on parchment. Victor’s body literally becomes a palimpsest for the text of someone else and retraces another symptomatic fever which left somebody else parched and mute. Caroline Beaufort’s scarlet fever, and its hushed meaning inhabit Victor’s skin and speak their mysterious message through the symptoms of Victor’s chronic ailment. “Behind,” in the past, “deeds beyond description horrible” took place and left their traces in a scar, a mark of shame, a “scar-let” fever. Skin is both the source of secret pleasure for the melancholic and the symptom of the disgrace and opprobrium of the mother. Victor’s regressive quest for origin and his illicit probing into forbidden and buried secrets take him back to the roots of a family scandal. Several indications in the text call for a revision of the family genesis with which Victor starts the narrative of his life to Walton. This account

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of his origins and filiation is too easily transformed into a fairy tale by childhood memories. Whereas a proud family would normally exhibit a wedding picture over the mantelpiece, only a picture of death presides over the destiny of the Frankensteins. The picture, the key episode and founding moment for the family, is the representation of Caroline grieving over her father’s corpse. The curse uttered by a disappointed monster (“I shall be with you on your wedding night”) then, far from initiating a frenzy of unknown fears, simply reactualizes an originary malediction: the family was doomed from the start. The secret seems to be buried in the frame. The painting indeed functions like a frame around the novel, which seems to duplicate compulsively the set-up of the picture. In a series of tableaux, the text presents us with Victor embracing in turn the dead bodies of Clerval and Elizabeth or bending over the inanimate corpses of the yet unborn and therefore still born monster or, later, of his unfinished companion. The mourner and the mourned constantly change position in a scenario that repeats itself obsessively. In the last scene, for instance, the monster mourning Victor clearly mirrors “Caroline Beaufort in an agony of despair kneeling by the coffin of her dead father” (60). The monster definitely takes up his role as a “mummy” and, in a scene of endocryptic identification, Victor is mourned by his dead-undead mother. Another visual symbol silently rehearses the sinister implications of the painting over the mantelpiece: “as I stood at the door on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak . . . so soon as the dazzling light vanished the oak had disappeared and nothing remained but a blasted stump” (31). Destruction lies at the root of the family tree. The novel as a whole could be seen as the development in slow motion of the devastation of the family tree. Avital Ronell establishes a direct connection between the incident of the destruction of the oak and the creation of the monster: “he has been laser-beamed into existence by the electrocution of a proud family tree, the oak-tree electrically devastated in the irrevocable instantaneity of a lightning flash.”34 The monster, himself without genealogy, shows and de-monstrates what is implicit in the image of the blasted tree, namely that the family is in a state of exhaustion and condemned to extinction. As the manifestation of the phantom of the crypt, he gives a visual and material form to the hushed secret, and the unwanted acts he performs are part of the hidden logic of the phantom. Every possible extension, branching off or expansion of the family is crushed in the bud by the monster. Frankenstein is indeed a Gothic text: “the tale of the sinful founder of

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his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house” (168). The German tale that inspired the novel is more than a vague shadow in the text. It shows that the text is haunted by other texts, and that haunting runs in the family. In the purest Gothic tradition, the text teems with allusions to the suffocating and unhealthy atmosphere of family life. Incest and endogamy pervade and pervert the whole novel. Walton (Wall-town?) who constantly refers to his homesickness, and thus implicitly to the sickness of his home, in his letters to his sister, nonetheless returns to Margaret Saville (Sa-ville, or Her-town). Justine’s original sin is to have been the favorite child of her father to the point of arousing the jealous revenge of her mother. In the 1818 version of the novel, Elizabeth marries her brother-cousin, and Alphonse finds in Caroline a daughter-bride. The taboo is actually inscribed in the text as an obscure fear that can only be voiced in “the other tongue.” The word incest is never written in the text but appears in the garb of an anagram, “insect,” which is used to qualify both Elizabeth (28) and the monster (73). But the perversion of family structures can be traced in the text beyond the scope of textual events. The picture over the mantelpiece, quickly mentioned on Victor’s return after William’s death, directs the reader’s attention to a central character, the founding father, rapidly brushed aside in Victor’s account of the family saga. Beaufort like the nameless monster remains an enigma and is not granted a first name. He is the first outcast. Living in wretchedness, he flees the community and carefully hides himself with his obedient and submissive daughter as far away as possible from potential gossips. However powerful the class patterns of bourgeois behavior that force Beaufort away in the disgrace of economic reversal, his cautiously planned retreat hides further motives.35 A secret layer of the mystery is uncovered by the narration of Victor’s nightmare on that dreary November night of the creation of a monster. The picture of Elizabeth walking in the street or street walking, as Sherwin remarks, is superimposed upon the image of the dead mother, and fuses with it. Seduction and exploitation form the blurred background of the shameful family story. They explain the “bitter tears” of a degraded daughter left a “beggar” maybe even before the actual death of her father. The tears, of course, have been wiped away in the mythic and yet ominous painting over the fireplace. But ironical innuendoes do not fail to linger, undermining the stainless perfection of the family story. Thus, in Alphonse’s desire to marry so as to “bestow on the state

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sons who might carry his virtues and his name down to posterity” (26), one cannot help hearing something else secretly “stowed” away yet radically different from the avowed wish. Unlike blood, virtue and name can be inherited. They are part of the social apparatus that gives a subject his/her identity. Blood on the other hand is the only thing that can be transmitted from father to child in a genealogical line. Now, in the novel, Frankenstein is a name that does not go down to posterity. Ernest, the unique survivor, is ruled out from the start as potential procreator, having been “afflicted with ill health from infancy” and being “incapable of severe application” (32), that is to say incapable of exerting himself in procreation. The secret carried by Victor and obscurely conveyed is that of the birth of “a blot . . . whom all men disowned” (89). The enigma that left its scars in the mother’s life resurfaces when Victor, unable to cope with her loss, magically reanimates her, opening “the festering wounds” (54) of past deeds, and giving vent to the pent-up secrets she took with her in death. The secret from the mother’s grave is that of an illegitimate birth. If the monster is the mother, he is also in a way her illegitimate secret child. He looks like Victor, and yet not like him. Bigger than him, he is shriveled as if older than Victor. And Victor unexpectedly calling him “abortion” might be partly voicing his mother’s painful secret.

Clandestination and telepathy But the transmission of a secret that originates in another generation does not simply bring out a hidden narrative within the text. It also determines the development of the text. The phantom creates a text appropriate to itself, and it creates for it a “destination.” Destination should be understood in the sense in which Derrida uses the term in Télépathie. Destination designates “a latent fatality or doomed end point of the message.”36 More than a pure chance incidence in the text, the tele-communicated message has a definite performative power. One could even speak of clan-destination, of a clandestine network and secret agency of the long-distance call from the transgenerational phantom. It shapes the internal logic of the text and molds, transforms and redefines its recipients, crypt-carriers and readers alike. The unpredictable and the unforeseen can change the course of the text and with it the course of its readers’ existence. In the same way as in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the unwilling listener of the old mariner’s confession is condemned never again to be a merry wedding guest, the destiny of the characters in Frankenstein is determined by the underlying

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message as much as by the open one. Justine, for instance, becomes the monstrous self that the public discourse turns her into as soon as she is enmeshed in the network of secret transmissions that leaks through the cracks of Victor’s crypt. Justine becomes the double of the mother in Elizabeth’s letter to Victor. She then carries the word that means “mother” when she wears around her neck the medallion, the icon for the mother. A symbolic chain links her to the secret message and makes her a party to the murder of a child, albeit in a devious way. The power of a hidden message also appears in the way a voice, like a letter, can transform the listener or correspondent. It is Professor Waldeman’s voice, the sweetest Victor ever heard, which precipitates him not only in his scientific enterprise but in the terrible world of forbidden knowledge. “Wald-man,” the “forest man,” condemns Victor to the knowledge hidden in the blasted family tree and to the “discovery of hidden blood circulation” (36). Unexpectedly, Elizabeth’s letter to her cousin in Ingolstadt (volume 1, Chapter 5) also clandestinely molds the course of events and so promotes and secures the destruction of the characters she introduces, as if to write or engrave a name was to condemn to the grave. The reception of the letter corresponds telepathically to the fulfillment of its secret program. Clerval’s letter to Victor demonstrates the same pernicious import of the unforeseen in a message. His death is concomitant with the moment of the reception of the letter by Victor. A secret program is thus unraveled, using the channels of open communication, but following another logic. The reader, in turn, is caught in a hidden system of interferences that mold him/her in the same way that letters mold their recipients in the novel. To read therefore is to become the unwitting sharer of an unstated secret and the wedding guest of an impossible wedding. Unconsciously exorcising hidden dramas, the reader is manipulated by the secret plan of the text exactly in the same way as Walton is manipulated by Victor’s narrative and becomes in turn the transmitter of the phantom. Victor’s story, which harbors the cryptic secret of his mother, is both echoed in and by Walton. Like Victor, the motherless explorer is in search of the magic of electricity. The magnetic power he is looking for in a sea of ice would restore for him the warm paradise of his childish dreams. The sea of ice, according to the multilingual code of the text is a secret crypt for a mother or “mère de glace” and the world of pleasure she represents. The same incestuous desire seems to pervade Walton’s family circle as it does the Frankensteins’, yet whereas Victor’s family tree ends in a sterile fire, Walton becomes the writer he could not be before his journey and his encounter with his strange host.

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The secret legacy bequeathed by Victor to his listener is the power to tell. Narrative production is resonance, and it is the fruit of haunting. Phantomatic transmission creates its “destinataire,” and transforms him into a writer. Walton becomes the narrator that the cryptic text within the text generates. Returning to Margaret Saville, Walton puts the quest for accursed origins to an end, but also turns a family model into a mode of production. Walton writes to his sister, narrating the tale told by the “brother of his heart.” Writing becomes the transmission, between the lines of family secrets. Similarly, Mary Shelley is both the producer and the product of phantomatic transmissions, a listener molded into a transmitter. The network of clandestine connections, which, in an unforeseeable way, links the characters of the story, includes Mary Shelley. As Anne Mellor notices, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s initials are indeed the same as Margaret Walton Saville. “In a sense the novel is written by the author to an audience of one, herself,” the critic concludes.37 From Frankenstein to Wollstonecraft, similar family dramas haunt a life story and a novel. The author is part of the program secretly enfolded in the text. If, according to the 1831 introduction, “everything must have a beginning . . . and that beginning must be linked to something that went before,” an author is also a transmitter, and narrative production is derivative and inhabited by transgenerational secrets. To give birth to a text might simply be to acknowledge that there can be no communication without tele-communication and no discourse without family secrets. The task of the reader could well be to decipher the ghostly messages also. Like interferences in a cross-wired communication, homophonic displacements, anagrams, slips of the tongue and physical symptoms open the text to heterogeneous meanings parasitically contained within the message. Reading texts as haunted writing offers new perspectives on the uncanny and the Gothic tradition. The uncanny is the intrusion of secretly implied meanings in a text. These alternative meanings housed in the text remain foreign to the discursive logic. Inscribed in the message, they nonetheless go against its grain. They constitute an unknown knowledge. Known in previous generations, or in a community for instance, they remain unknown to their recipients. A text is a monstrous patchwork of other texts, and an uncanny text is a text that accepts its secret inheritance. The Gothic tradition as a whole may take another dimension when analyzed in terms of cryptonymy and phantomatic transmissions. In Gothic fiction, the key to the mystery is often to be found in events predating the text, and it is frequently the deviance of the previous generation that condemns the younger generation

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to endless ordeals. Language only conveys a dominant discourse and buries alive or silences unwanted voices. In the Gothic and certainly in Frankenstein, those voices reemerge, telling stories that a community is not necessarily willing to accept. Obsessed with adultery, illegitimacy and incest, the Gothic becomes the polyphonic structure, which houses monstrousness and unsayable secrets. Monstrousness is that which the easy categorizing of cultural discourse proscribes. Monstrousness must speak between the lines, in distress and in di-stress. In Frankenstein, monstrousness, the shameful secret of a bourgeois family is given a ghostly voice, the mother’s.

5 Secretions and Secretaries: The Secret of Dracula

Thus the spirits of the dead are everywhere around and within us, in everything we use and in everything we think, feel, and do, and it is in literal truth in the lives of the living that the dead live and by the lives of the dead that the living live. Henry Maudsley, Psychiatrist1 In the psychiatric universe of Maudsley as in the gothic universe of Abraham and Torok’s theory of phantomatic transmission, communication and textuality, far from constituting a natural channel for the expression and constitution of the self, seem to generate interference. Interference precipitates the sense of an erasure of the subject and of the demise of the symbolic. The spirits of the dead are everywhere: the subject, a mere heir, a transmitter and transcriber, is condemned to be the voice of another. Displacement is at the core of textuality, as both reader and writer are the unsuspected vehicles of unknown messages. Haunting is the form of all textuality. The pervasive sense that there can be no script without a crypt is the Gothic truth that the characters of Dracula come to discover. The novel explores the question of textuality by setting up the Law against the obscure threat of the vampire (a metaphor for what resists assimilation in the system and thus stands for otherness in its multifarious acceptations).2 The law is an ideal of textuality, cut off from the contaminating influence of the body and material contingencies. Its representatives are secretaries, lawyers, businessmen and scientists, a managerial force at the service of a culture. But of course the law is destined to be haunted by the very fact that it is constituted according to the processes of taboo and abjection and thus leaves behind a remainder that comes back with 108

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a vengeance. Dagonet, reflecting on the uncanny connections between words like “secret” and “secretary” or “secretion,” which all contain an element of concealment but also evoke a sense of discharging or expressing and thus are in contradiction with the idea of putting into hiding, inevitably points to the issue of haunted writing. In the same way as “heimlich” hides in its semantic folds “unheimlich,” there is no secret that has never been long known and familiar. Writing down will always be both containing and revealing.3 Secrets by nature, speak, they always ooze and are shared or made public: The word “secret” must be compared to “secretion” (that which flows) and “secretary” (documents preserved and made public, depositions, records). Certainly a gland must remove from circulation those substances it needs to produce its secretions. It sets aside and hoards accordingly. Likewise, an administration keeps its archives locked up. In both cases something is isolated; this meaning however is masked by other meanings, namely that of discharging (the gland) and informing (the secretariat). In short, language never lies. Through words, one knows that what one claims to be hidden is not. Secretions and secretaries hide less than they reveal.4 “In short, language never lies” could be the formula that sums up Dracula, a novel conceived in the age of shorthand and secretaries. Indeed it is in Kittler’s formula, “a typewriter’s myth.”5 It reflects an awareness of the contradictions between the functions of consigning and retaining information inherent in writing and typing with vampiric secretions. Staging its own mediality, that is “the processing, storage and transmission of data” that constitute its textuality, Stoker’s novel theorizes its own modes of functioning as “literature.”6 “Literature” here is intended in its Schlegelian sense:7 literature is self-reflexive textuality and it produces itself through self-questioning. Very much in the tradition of the Gothic, Stoker’s novel takes the intuition of haunting in language, as the core of all textuality, into the realm of modernity. Situated at the hinge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Stoker’s text reflects the new technologies and historically specific machineries that transform radically the mode of existence of language. The novel actually embodies what Kittler describes as the “Modernist discourse,” in variance with the “Romantic discourse” which was rehearsed and challenged in Frankenstein for instance. As inscription becomes mechanized, writing is no longer the site where the authority of the subject is registered. The new “discourse network,” to use Kittler’s formula, marks a revolution in the notion of

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individuality. In the age of the typewriter, where language is transcribed, decentered and cut from its originary source by the very act of typing which takes over the authority of the writer, there is no subject behind writing. Michel Butor clearly shows how the typewriter challenges the myth of the author as a whole, centered, superior consciousness. “Due to the very fact that it is a machine, it removes from the act of writing a good deal of its aristocratic prestige. What I am doing at the moment is therefore working with my hands.”8 Furthermore, what my hand produces is no longer an individual graphic sign, but a standardized and depersonalized script. “The typewritten text always appears as written by someone else,” as Olorenshaw remarks.9 Together with the typewriter, the phonograph also participates in the media revolution that makes for the collapse of the written word. Kittler traces the decline of Romanticism to the invention of phonographic storage media. The medium of print is suddenly challenged, after centuries of pre-eminence, because literary language cannot evoke and render the sounds of the world as accurately as the phonograph. Mechanical mimesis brings down the supremacy of literary language as a representational medium. With its mechanical apparatus, Dracula stages the demise of the written word. The discourse network circa 1900 is clearly the dark double of the Romantic discourse on representation, authority and the subject. Yet, although distances in time and space are shrinking, thanks to new methods of consignment and faster communication networks, their “frantic abolition brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in the shortness of distance.”10 Something else intrudes in the system of communication. Something that does not “mean,” that is to say, does not participate in the conveyance of information, and yet insists. The new communication network itself is haunted. “All media of transmission,” Wellbery explains, “require a material channel, and the characteristic of every material channel is that beyond the information it carries, it produces noise and nonsense.”11 The new discourse network necessarily includes interferences and typos. Literature, then, stands in essential relation to meaningless elements, which it must exclude. Literature is defined “not by what it means but by the difference between meaning and non-meaning, information and noise, that its medial possibilities set into place.”12 There is in technology a spectral dimension that forces us to read and hear what has never been uttered. The background noises “bring the alien near.” The typewriter, for instance, is also the medium of dictation. It frees writing from the control of the eye of consciousness and opens up the possibility of automatisms and unconscious reflexes. Similarly, the phonograph records differences of vibrational frequency

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that escape conscious audition. Something is liable to pass beneath the level of consciousness. What Benjamin noted about film, a medium that is absent from Dracula’s world, can be generalized to the typewriter and the phonograph. Film records data of the visual unconscious “in discreet frames that cannot themselves be perceived in the film image.”13 Dracula is therefore the text of modernity haunted by its own spectral nature. The new discourse network includes a spectrographic dimension. And indeed, vampirism is the direct result of typewriting, or rather the spectral other of the typewritten text. Vampirism, Jennifer Wicke writes, “springs up, or takes command, at the behest of shorthand”14 and “it is Mina’s prowess with the typewriter that brings down Dracula on unsuspecting British necks, including her own.”15 Dracula, the name and therefore the creature, might well be a typo, a mistake that infiltrates the whole data system or what Stoker at the beginning of his text calls “needless matter” that should have been eliminated in the secretarial fantasy of ultimate tidiness and efficacy (8). Needless matter is like the remainder; it exists in the linguistic system in a disturbingly perfunctory manner. The creation of the robot-secretary, of the woman typist in the last decades of the nineteenth century historically corresponds to the true moment of liberation for women. The office girl can no longer be confined to the private sphere. Her function is the interface of branching streams of data. The dutiful secretary, the perfect instrument of her culture and civilization also becomes, potentially, the source of its necessary demise as she explodes the myth of the separation of spheres and enters the world of competition. Turning voice into script and text, Mina, now a piece of the social fabric, gains access to her own secret world of desire. There can be no typing without dictation, and no dictation without an unconscious. “Secretary” always hides “secrets” and “secretions.” Vampirism is desire. It is the world of secretions and secrets that Mina’s secretarial talent brings forth, unexpectedly.

Buzzing noises and the spells of the modern world: From “transcript” to “transcrypt” An anonymous note, from an anonymous collector of information, or body of informants, initiates the narrative. This foreword gives us the measure of the dream: Dracula is a case history, a mass of information, a sum of facts. From this factual mesh, subjectivity has been eliminated: There is throughout no statement of past events wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given

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from the standpoints and within the range and knowledge of those who made them. (8) In theory, there should be no gap in the narrative texture, no holes, just facts in this modern, rational and efficient compilation of documents. Authorial presence is diffused and shared. Narration has become a series of recordings from various sources. And each of these sources is presented as purely objective. The past, personal history and memory are not part of the process: the gap between the event and its narration has been reduced precisely because narration is no longer a valid form of rendering. The event is not narrated, it is transcribed, becomes a trace on a wax roll or a puncture on the paper. The event is immediately processed, mechanized, preserved and stored in its actuality in a safe. There is no personal history and no hand behind the scraps of documents typed and classified by Mina. Although on the narrative level the vampire haunts the lives of the characters, there should be no linguistic haunting in Dracula, because the past has been so carefully superseded by the omnipotence of data collecting in the present recording that there can be no remainders. The text is careful to present its information in a perfectly objective manner and there is no distinction between intention and citation or independent thought and mere repetition. This clearly appears in the homogenization of the information piled up into a “text.” Memos, telegrams, newspaper clips, travel logs and diaries succeed one another and are juxtaposed rather than organized according to obvious hierarchical principles of arrangement. These different documents are typewritten and thus given the same format, the same font and the same anonymity. The typewriter deprives documents of subjective authority as it takes language away from the mind and into the mechanical power of the hand. “The typewriter uses a blind, tactile power,” Kittler explains.16 Before the invention of the “view typewriter” by Underwood in 1898, and therefore at the time of the composition of Dracula, all typewriters wrote invisible lines that could only be read after the act. Kittler quotes the following comment by Angelo Beyerlen: In writing by hand, the eye must constantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each written line, must measure, direct, and in short, guide the hand through each movement . . . By contrast, after one presses down briefly on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a complete

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letter, which not only is untouched by the writer’s hand but is also located in a place entirely apart from where the hand works.17 The typewriter eliminates the play between “Man the sign-setter and the writing surface,” Kittler writes.18 If, in Frankenstein, anxiety surfaces as the hand and the eye can no longer function as the representative of subjective agency, in Dracula, power comes precisely from the dissociation of the script from its subjective source.19 This, at least is the fiction presented by the fiction. A new form of literature appears with Dracula; a literature detached from any central consciousness, a text produced and arranged mechanically. Mina calls this text an “exercise-book” in the style of what “lady journalists do,” that is, “interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations” (70). Mina turns herself into a machine. She becomes a mechanical hand and a mechanical ear. Her purpose is to be able to “remember all that goes on or that one hears said during the day” (70). Mina’s text has no master discourse. But, only this highly effective machine records a series of discursive events, rather than individual occurrences. This is what the conclusion to the novel seems to indicate: “we were struck with the fact that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document!” as Harker remarks (449). The narrative produces itself as it insists on the means of its own production. The narrative thread is the thread that “knits together in chronological order every scrap of evidence that they have” (269). The thread becomes the substance of the narrative and of the actions, at the expense of the hand that sews. The robosecretary, a phono-steno-graph and typewriter, is hardly a human being. She becomes a force at the service of a cause. This is clearly stated as the very motive for the narration or rather collation of documents that constitute the text. She must follow “the thread of continuity . . . That fearful Count was coming to London” (215). Her “solemn duty” was to “get her typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Then [the papers will] be ready for other eyes if required” (215). It is her duty to type out Harker’s intimate journal and to turn it into mass mediation. Typing is an enterprise at the service of the community. Mina becomes the agent of the bourgeois, imperial economy. The typewriter and the gramophone are at the service of the law and the psychiatric institution. Mina, who is not happy in her feminine career as “assistant schoolmistress,” turns herself into the instrument of Jonathan’s professional success: she wants to “take down what he wants to say and write it out for him” (70). She lends herself to the advancement

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of a certain social and political ideal. The typewriter and the new technology at the service of the office world reconfigure the general aspect of the work place and redefine knowledge. Harker’s work as a solicitor is to ensure the authenticity and legality of inheritance and property, thus to ensure the continuity of the system. The solicitor’s office is the place where patriarchal rules are justified because officially asserted, in the legal documents that are stored, ordered, classified and accumulated. The legal discourse, reinforced by the new technology, strangely echoes the medical discourse of the time. Seward and Van Helsing’s interest is the brain. Seward uses the gramophone as a medical tool to “advance [his own] branch of science to a pitch” (90). The new technology becomes a means of conquest. The new discourse that emerges at the turn of the century and that reinforces the legal and medical institutions is that of mass mediation. This discourse sees information as a network, and describes the network as a huge neurological system that stores particulars, and stores them exhaustively. Kittler describes the discourse as “neurotheological.”20 The brain is the model. In the same way as “the greatest part of the human cerebrum consists in nothing more than millions of well-isolated circuits measuring thousands of kilometers,” the world becomes a network of information.21 Nerves are data recorders. Data recording becomes a form of control. Information is transmitted from ear to hand, from secretary to secretary, from office to office, in a crisscrossing of lines and wires, in an accumulation of documents duly reproduced, copied and distributed. The tentacular power of the brain-like system of communication as a nervous circuit reaches beyond the borders of the workplace, beyond the office where the world of patriarchy reaffirms its efficacy and rightfulness. It colonizes the universe at large, in the form of tourism for instance. Harker in Transylvania, transcribing recipes in shorthand and noting down details of local color, is a part of the network of information at the service of neo-imperialism. The new technology also brings together the Texan Quincey and Van Helsing in a close-knit network of information and exchanges, which helps edify a modern world around the same values. The concept of knowledge is redefined in the context of the network technology. The story of Dracula is in fact that of the struggle of memory and knowledge. In the novel, knowledge is not gained by experience and self-development, that is to say helped by memory, but rather it becomes the accumulation of data. “Remember my friend that knowledge is stronger than memory and we should not trust the weaker,” says Van Helsing (146). And knowledge consists in recording facts: “nothing is too small. I counsel you,” Van Helsing continues, “put

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down in record even your doubts and surmises” (146). Recollection is the enemy. Instead, knowledge becomes the interface between branching streams of data. The image of the interface appears clearly in the text, with Mina at the keyboard: The sheep and lambs are bleating in the fields away behind me, and there is a clatter of a donkey’s hoofs up the paved road below. The band on the pier is playing a harsh waltz in good time, and farther along the quay there is a Salvation Army meeting in a back street. Neither of the bands hears the other, but up here I hear and see them both (86) Streams of sound can be connected by Mina’s brain, trained to become a perfect gramophone. Mina is listening and writing from her vantage point, her switching center. Her training gives her an ability superior to nature: she can hear both bands at the same time, and she records both at the same time in her shorthand journal. She can connect different sources of information. Noises accumulate and start making sense, when placed in a network. Yet, symptomatically, it is from the graveyard that Mina organizes textual space and the surrounding flow of data. If, as Rickels writes, the “scene of writing which the typewriter introduces is new, precisely to the extent that it admits women who henceforward mediate and take the place of every new prosthetic telecommunication device,” nonetheless “woman becomes Perse-phone, putting through calls in the underworld, re-inscribing the vampire’s bite with typewriter’s keys.”22 Her keyboard surreptitiously becomes a switchboard and the voices of the dead come to be inscribed in the interstice of her shorthand signs. The transcript is indeed a transcrypt. The fictional foreword to the novel then reads as denial: “how these papers have been placed in sequence will be made clear in the reading of them” (8). Chronology is not the only “sequence” in the novel, and it is in fact the information system that brings forth the vampire, as it is itself, by nature, vampiric. Information does not simply circulate. It is made available to all eyes and thus made consumable. Shorthand allows more information to be processed and distributed. It also entails, to use Jennifer Wicke’s formula, the vampirization of speech.23 Voice disappears and is codified, that is made accessible. Dracula functions like a newspaper. It is mass mediation for the consumption of all. The narrative arrangement corresponds to what Wicke calls “the transmogrification of the narrative’s nominal events into mass cultural shards.” The press actually figures

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in the text as newspaper clips have been cut and pasted to the core of the story and are given the same weight as diaries or personal accounts. Lucy’s life as a vampire for instance is heavily mediated. The vampire hunters can only eliminate her when she becomes the tabloid version of the vampire, that is, an object of collective consumption. As Wicke writes, “while her vamping by Count Dracula precedes her ‘bloofer lady’ role and indeed causes it, the un-dead Lucy is similarly vamped by the press, and vamps all those who come under her thrall by just reading about her in the morning paper.”24 Writing, reading and vampirism seem to form a whole in Dracula where as Olorenshaw remarks, “we find exactly the same theme of possessing, of digesting other lives accompanied by the motif of social dissolution in the frequent representations that the novel gives of the acts of writing and reading.”25 The highly technological network of communication that the novel displays is entirely devoted to the knowledge of the inner life of other people. This knowledge circulates like blood in the story. Van Helsing even compares the vampire hunters and the vampire in that respect: “It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him . . . preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love” (407). Transcribing on the typewriter brings about the same relationship of intimacy as that which links Lucy to Dracula, and Dracula through her to Quincey, Seward, Van Helsing and Arthur. And writing, like vampirism, “reproduces” itself endlessly. Mina’s typewriter has a “manifold function.” Like Dracula who turns all the people with whom he comes in close contact into vampires, the typescript brings together its various actors and readers, united in each other’s secrets if not secretions. Mina’s exercise book in fact turns into a place of haunting, revealing the nocturnal side of the world of machines. The typewriter is also the place where unconscious automatisms appear. Typewriting is highspeed writing, and high speed is uncontrollable speed. Kittler records the following remark by an experimental typist who, in 1904, trained constantly on the keyboard for 38 days and wrote the following in a test journal: “Today, I found myself not infrequently striking letters before I was conscious of seeing them. They seem to have been perfecting themselves, just under the level of consciousness.”26 Mina herself seems to be aware of the dark power of stenography. This elliptical bureaucratized form of writing opens the door to unwanted connections, all the more so as it is taken under dictation: “there is something about the shorthand symbols which makes it different from writing” (90). There is no such a thing as passive transmission. High-speed writing technologies

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encounter the whispers of the dead undead, “just under the level of consciousness.” In a discarded part of the first chapter of Dracula, Jonathan recounts his journey to Transylvania, and in particular the terrible “Walpurgis Nacht” during which he comes across the grave of Countess Dolingen of Gratz in Styria.27 This first encounter with a vampire in the novel could be seen as a direct allusion to Le Fanu’s Carmilla and a hint at the fact that writing is always vamping. Dracula is born of the consumption and reading of Le Fanu’s story. But the short story interestingly also gives a reading clue for the novel. On the back of the grave of the Countess, the following words are inscribed, in Russian letters: “the dead travel fast.”28 High speed leads to the kingdom of the dead. In writing, the abolition of distances in space and time does not bring spatial or temporal nearness. Stenography is spectrography. Jonathan, for instance, remarks that Mina’s voice under hypnotism sounds very much like her voice when she is reading her shorthand notes: it is a distant voice, full of dreaminess, a voice from below the level of consciousness.29 She sounds as if she was reading back from a text. Stenographing his own travel journal, Jonathan also brings forth unexpected ghosts from the past: Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letters, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill. (49) Writing down his own diary, taking notes like a secretary, he also literally writes upon a secretaire which sheltered the secret letters of “some fair lady” of old times. In the interstices of his elliptical shorthand symbols, other narratives are lodged, suggesting that textuality is inseparable from the idea of a palimpsest. These narratives are the secret texts of female passion: unsayable and half erased these secrets, like all hushed secrets, will inevitably seep through the holes of the text. Harker’s contemporary account of his life in Transylvania cuts across a tradition of female writing. Modernity does not supplant the texts of older days. On the contrary, Harker’s shorthand journal opens up a new space for these forgotten texts of passion. Rebecca Pope sees Lucy as the “daughter of the female letter-writer Harker believes he has

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displaced.”30 Lucy’s letter to Mina in which she details her three proposals of marriage is a text of forbidden passion. It describes female desire and shows how much at odds it is with masculinist gender codes. Illicit desire creeps through the text, in the figure of the female writer of love letters of old times that Harker, by naming yet denying, has called up and liberated. Desire haunts the script of his travel journal and of all the diaries to come in the text. Foucault clearly shows how the fantastic emerges from writing: The domain of phantasms is no longer the night, the sleep of reason or the uncertain void that stands before desire, but on the contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition and constant vigilance. Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volumes that open with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, . . . within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp.31 Impossible worlds of desire are liberated for Harker and for Mina and then all the readers who are given his diary to read. It is his constant vigilance and efficacy that brings forth the voice of the past in his “modernity.” The uncanny emerges from writing. Writing, says Mina, “is like whispering to oneself and listening at the same time” (91). Whispers are unheard. Yet they come to be inscribed in black and white, on the page, surreptitiously, almost subconsciously. The encounter with writing is an encounter with textual ghosts. Dracula, that is to say the forbidden or fantasized circulation of blood and other secretions, appears as a direct consequence of the secretarial force and technologies deployed by the texts. His pervasiveness and gradual invasion of the text is proportionate to the amount of writing generated by the text. The more the characters write, the deeper Dracula penetrates into their lives. In other words, Dracula is inherent in the function of writing. Desire infiltrates discourse even as discourse erects barriers against this dark double. Dracula is part of the gesture and the physicality of the act of writing or rather typing. Dracula is a key character of the text because he is a key, a character, on the typewriter. Christopher Craft reminds us that the term “character” functions in at least three senses: “who and what one is, the role one plays in society’s supervening script, and the sign or letter that is intelligible only within the constraints of a larger sign system.”32 Dracula corresponds

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essentially to the third meaning. Etymologically, a character is a sign branded on the skin. Dracula is the eyeteeth scratching the white surface of Mina or Lucy’s throat. Skin is like a white page. He is therefore essentially the mark left by the key of the typewriter on the page. Dracula is precisely what happens “when type hits paper, leaving an impression or sometimes a hole,” to quote Kittler.33 He is the grooving or scratching of a surface and the mark left by the needle on the wax roll of Doctor Seward’s phonograph. Dracula, sign and type, represents a certain relationship between the hand and the keyboard of the typewriter. Spread out from “a” to “l,” his name corresponds to the natural position of the hands resting on the QWERTY keyboard; DRAC on the left hand and UL on the right then A again.34 But this name is also susceptible to permutations. Dracula is also D. or Count Deville. Dracula is a scatter of differential marks, a series of symbols used in the close-knit system of alphabetical language. The vampire is a by-product of language, and his existence is a function of the combination of fingers and keys. The keys of the keyboard, in high-speed typing sometimes open up the doors to realms other than that of reality, when the hands lose control for an instant of unconscious automatism. “Dreams laugh at locksmiths,” says Laura in Carmilla. “Keys (on the keyboard) open up the closed doors of the world of dreams,” Count Dracula could add. In the same way that Carmilla, Le Fanu’s female vampire, lives only within the limited free play of anagrammatic permutations, Dracula exists within the space offered by the variations on the keyboard. Carmilla, Countess Mircalla can only be Millarca or Carmilla. Beyond the name as a series of letters, there is no vampire. The vampire is the tomb that inhabits each differential mark. On the neck of the child who was a victim of the bloofer lady, the marks of the vampire are like a bite, the bite of an animal, “a rat” or “bats” in the diagnosis of the doctor (234). Rat or bat: with the vampire, language goes back to this arbitrary differentiation, to the sliding from one to the other. The vampire is a linguistic fantasy. Dracula therefore can only be De Ville, which on the keyboard appears as a series of typos, when the fingers, typing DRACULA at high speed, slip on the keyboard. Dracula can be mistyped as DeVille. Locked up in the keyboard as in his coffin, Dracula represents a force that thrives on the linguistic possibilities opened up by the free play of touch and type. He is what shifts, misspells, misprints and thus opens up new meanings in the text typed by Mina for the Crew of Light. He is the sliding effect in language, the jarring and the homophonic confusion inherent in the system. He is precisely the remainder that the

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system can only recycle. He is the un-dead at the heart of the act of symbolization. Dracula haunts language. His is the mark of the return of the dead, which signifies that reality is never properly buried in language. Dracula is what haunts writing. He is the subterranean force of desire, the body, the abject and the sensible that refuse to die in signification. In him, the system comes to a point of collapse. In order to read Dracula then, one must read Dracula as the symptom or the dis-ease of the text. The logic that must inform our reading follows the line of Renfield’s alternative system. Seward describes the mode of thinking of his patient as “unconscious cerebration” (88), a gradual subterranean linking of facts and events according to rules that are not those of our rational world.35 There is method in the madness of this text in which scattered pieces of puzzle slowly come together with the help of Stoker’s array of narrators. These narrators and indeed the major actors of the drama are brought together not by chance but because they are part of the same nervous circuit. All the characters come to be defined at some point of the text by the state of their nerves. Van Helsing’s “iron nerves” contrast with Harker’s nerves, which “tremble,” for instance. They are thus wired together, and the keyboard functions also as a vast switchboard that operates a complex network of nerves. Consequently, the narratives do not complement one another, enfolding in a chronological pattern and promoting a sense of gradual narrowing of the issue. The texts do not follow one another in a logical sequence. They duplicate one another, like a perverse form of copying, just like Mina’s manifold copies of a unique script. Thus, for instance, Harker’s diary used to start with a scene of haunting in the cemetery outside Munich, in front of the inscription on the grave of a dead and yet undead Countess. In a similar fashion, Mina’s diary was started and composed in the cemetery at Whitby where she too learns about the lies of inscriptions on tombs. Even more unusual and complex echoes and similitudes bring the various narratives together. Lucy becomes connected to Renfield, without their stories ever crossing paths, by the silent buzzing of flies which tie together Mr. Swales’ account of George Canon’s death and Dr. Seward’s description of Renfield’s hobby. Canon’s suicide “brought the clegs and the dowps to him,” that is horse flies and flies (85). The flies that gather over the corpse of the dead man reappear in Seward’s notes concerning his zoophagous patient. Coincidence and echoes seem to take over chronology. Renfield’s hobby is catching flies, and “when a horrid blow-fly bloated with some carrion food buzzed into the room, he caught it, held it exultantly for a moment between his finger and thumb, [. . .] put it in his mouth and ate it” (87–8).

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Renfield is like a magnetic force field for death. Death circulates in the air, as a fly flies, following an erratic, obtuse and secret course. “The fly, my dear sir,” Renfield explains, “has one striking feature: its wings are typical of the aerial powers of the psychic faculties. The ancients did well when they typified the soul as a butterfly” (320). Flies and butterflies represent another form of connectedness and communication that works against the grain of reason. Lucy then is condemned by some perverse logic to repeat the tragic story of George Canon, a suicide, therefore a dead undead. She too, like Canon, walks on the cliffs in her sleepwalking. Unconscious cerebration therefore comes in direct contradiction with linearity, chronology and causality. If flies circulate across decades and beyond graves, unconscious cerebration or the world of secret resonance also takes the form of telepathy. Mrs. Harker and Renfield, for instance, are connected by some strange power. “I wonder,” Seward writes in his diary, “if it was Mrs. Harker’s presence which had touched some chord in his memory. If this new phase was spontaneous, or in any way due to her unconscious influence, she must have some rare gift or power” (279). Touching chords, the language of nerves, or the language of souls, create alternative meanings in the text. These several alternative modes of communication create interferences in the text as they cross wires with the most obvious line of argumentation expressed by the orderly narrative sequence. Renfield, entirely given to unconscious cerebration, fears any contact with the Crew of Light precisely because “he was jealous of some interference” (278). Meaning circulates in devious and indirect ways in the novel. Interferences and statics in cross wired communication create an alternative logic to the chronological reading of events that Mina, the medical and the judicial institutions try to impose. The secret thread that links the various narratives together does not promote succession and sequentiality. The narratives do not follow one another. They are parallel and superimposable. Their arrangement in the text obeys the rules of association: random echoes, metaphors or dissonances create patterns of meaning. Dracula is a crossroads of meanings, and one must listen differently to the linguistic clues of the text in order to reach this meeting point. The text is at cross-purpose with itself, and its language activates contrary modes of expression at the same time. A name and a place therefore stand out as the clues for countermoves in the text: the name is “Harker,” and the place “Carfax.” Taken literally, these words unveil in language secret layers of meaning. It is this literality that haunts the text in the form of fictitious verbal scenarios.

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“Look with thine ears” (King Lear): Dracula’s Gothic imperative The ear only can perceive and pierce the dis-ease of the signifier in the text. Mina brings Dracula on her own neck and those of her companions because, unconsciously, her diary is not the place where she speaks to herself, but the site where she comes to listen “at the same time.” Writing she says “is like whispering to oneself and listening at the same time” (91). Mina becomes Mina “Harker,” the “destinataire” and receptacle of unsayable messages. Mina is a cryptophore, an ear at the service of hidden stories. Jonathan Harker, at the very same moment, while playing secretary in an old dilapidated room of Dracula’s castle, is suddenly forced to listen to the lives of all the women who wrote on the secretaire. Condemned to hear (“hark”) and be haunted by stories not their own, the characters must learn to listen differently, that is to pay attention to “difference” in language. Dracula proposes an education of the ear. It is essentially parabolic, that is to say that it proposes, alongside its main narrative, stories that give clues. One of the main parables in the text is that of the ears of corn. Van Helsing thus describes a method for alternative readings: the husbandman must let the ear of corn grow before he can “pull the ear and rub him between his rough hands, and blow away the green chaff, and say . . . ‘Look! he’s good corn; he will make good crop when the times comes’” (145). Van Helsing then playfully pulls Seward’s ear. “I have sown my corn, and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout; if he sprout at all, there’s some promise, and I wait till the ear begins to swell” (146). Rubbing the ear to make it swell is reading for haunting and discrepant messages in the text and treating language as a telltale medium. Ears rapidly begin to swell in Dracula, if one accepts having one’s ears rubbed and pulled, that is, if one accepts listening to disturbing, jarring sounds. Gradually, all the main protagonists, although they are locked up in the modern system of network communication and obviously seem to believe in piling up documents as proof and cure against the vampire, become sensitive to an “ex-communicated” site in their own discursive production. Voices come to be heard in writing precisely at the point where technology is supposed to have expelled and eliminated them. These voices tell of unconscious cerebration. This is why Lucy, then Mina, Jonathan and Renfield are described as “sleeping soundly.” In the sleep of consciousness, there are “sounds” and noises to which one must pay attention. This is also why Van Helsing, just after having offered his parable speaks “gravely” (146).

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This grave tone is literally the tone from the grave. It is a tone that Lucy (85), Dracula, Seward and Mina come to share. When the ear swells, then the dead start to speak. Memory and knowledge come into conflict in the very form of the main narratives: the diary. There is, in the writing of the self, something that is bound to resist the information system put in place by the new modes of mass-communication. Stenography and the phonograph become spectrography because they are forced to adapt to a mold that they exclude: the elegy. Mina, Jonathan and Seward whose diaries figure predominantly in the text, all share a sense of absence and loss palliated by the lies of writing. Their texts exemplify what Castle calls the spectralization of the other. Mina writes because her fiancé is far away. Writing is therefore a lament and a form of displacement for her. Writing about the other metonymically replaces the other. Writing allows a free play between presence and absence. Harker also writes for the absent one, conjuring up her presence in signs to mitigate her absence in reality. As for Seward, he starts recording the notes that constitute the case history of Renfield’s zoophagy when Lucy rejects him. His diary is “where the romance of his life is told” (212). The constant presence of Renfield allows the displacement of Lucy’s absence. This opens the door for further displacement: vampirism is also a form of mitigation of the inevitability of death as it mimics the process and effect of writing: the vampire, like a sign, comes back from the dead and signifies its presence on the white page of the body. The written text mummifies the other in a pretense of being. Introjection is the process that shapes writing as the antidote to death and absence. It creates empty tombs, because the other is dead or absent and yet not so: the other lives in signs and is undead. The fear of absence and death prompts the obsessive return to the world of memory where the dead continue to live. The diary paradoxically belongs to the world of memory; its aim is to cancel temporal and spatial distance between the self and other, as the lovers write for each other. Yet, the Crew of Light uses it to serve the world of knowledge. To hear differently, then, consists in seeing the traces of memory in the text of knowledge, and seeing how these traces form a path for meaning. The vampire haunts the text with the necessity of looking and hearing “awry.” As an undead, he is the past that crumples the text with imports from another time and place. The world of memory cannibalized by the world of knowledge lives undead within knowledge, reminding us that “it is in the lives of the living that the dead live and by the lives of the dead that the living live,” to quote again the epigraph to this chapter.

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Thus three diaries are read together at Carfax. Carfax is the place where all the characters meet and all the texts are knitted together. Carfax is the place Jonathan chooses for Dracula, the place where Seward works and observes Renfield, and indirectly the place where Mina’s diary also leads the reader. Carfax is what they all have in common. “Carfax,” etymologically, is a place where four roads meet. As Leonard Wolf notes in The Annotated Dracula, “what makes this choice of a name for Dracula’s later hideaway interesting is that suicides were buried at crossroads.”36 Traditionally, suicides are condemned to wander and never inhabit their tombs. The inscription on the graves of suicides lies. A suicide’s grave is an empty grave. As the place for empty graves, Carfax is the crossroads where the characters commune in impossible mourning. For this is their common point: they all have in them an undead other of whom they refuse to let go. Van Helsing mourns for his lost son who is kept alive, imaginatively, in the resemblance he bears, in the old man’s eyes, with Arthur: “my heart,” Van Helsing confesses, “bleeds for that poor boy—that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same” (210). The bite of the vampire and the type of the letters on paper revive the wound of melancholia. Seward sees his rejection by Lucy as an open wound (228). The crisscrossing of nerve paths, which constitutes the secret arrangement of the text, becomes possible in Carfax because there lives the very embodiment of melancholia, Renfield. Renfield is literally propelled into the story by Seward’s grief. He knows he has been constructed into a case so as to answer the call Seward dials in secret after his rejection: he knew Seward wanted to marry (278). He is an index and a symptom. In him, the scenarios of somebody else are being rehearsed and voiced. His tongue is tied and he is not his own master (294). Yet one can hear in him the unsayable. His melodramatic gestures allow him to ventriloquize messages that are closed off in quotidian existence. “He desires to absorb as many lives as he can and has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way” (90). His zoophagy reproduces the very moves of melancholy. His is a fantasy of incorporation: “I used to fancy,” he confesses, “that by consuming a multitude of live things [. . .] one might indefinitely prolong life” (279–80). Zoophagy is the belief in the realm of the dead alive. Objects are kept alive by absorption. They are stored away in a secret part of the ego where they exist, un-dead. But absorbing and preserving life, the zoophagous patient or the melancholic also absorb the secrets of their inhabitants. Zoophagy entails

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phantomatic transmission. The cryptophore, in this case Renfield who is the receptacle for all the lives he has consumed, is haunted by the secrets of the other. Renfield’s victims in turn “prey on him.” The cryptophore is a mere ventriloquist. Seward’s mistake in his analysis of his patient is that he is unable to perceive that his patient was only the host for a guest. Seward’s mistake in that respect is similar to Freud’s problem in his analysis of the Wolf Man. It was not Sergei who was speaking to the analyst, but in him, the dead and yet undead sister he had incorporated.37 Renfield therefore points outside himself: “I myself am an instance of a man who had a strange belief,” he says of himself (279). Renfield sees himself as a first and third person at the same time. He is himself and yet exemplifies someone else. He stands in for someone else’s belief and is spoken through. The text, with its modern equipment and its extremely up-to-date technology, is haunted by a stranger whose secret is disseminated in the various narratives.

Secret transmissions Van Helsing’s method of listening for the discordant notes in the narrative of events that link the various characters together immediately points to Mr. Swales. “I wait till the ear begins to swell,” announced the old doctor, or rather “to Swale(s).” What Renfield rehearses in Carfax, Mr. Swales had already voiced in Whitby. The counterlogic of the text therefore moves us backwards in textual space and in time. The voices of the dead are first heard in the cemetery by the sea. Mr. Swales is the Ancient Mariner. Dracula is thus haunted by the shadow of other texts, master texts and textual ghosts that continue to exert their influence and remain undead, living a life of their own even after they have been read. Like the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge’s poem, Swales’ revelations make it impossible for Lucy to marry Arthur and for Mina to consummate her marriage with Harker. The story he tells precedes the narrative of events and exceeds it. It is this story that is constantly rehearsed and repeated, but which also renders Dracula’s death inane and closure impossible. Alan Johnson sees Renfield and Swales as doubles of each other and doubles of, respectively, Mina and Lucy.38 The attack on Swales occurs shortly after his conversation with Lucy and just before Dracula’s first attack on her. In a similar fashion, Johnson notices, Dracula breaks Renfield’s neck after he has talked with Mina and just before the vampire visits her for the second time. “Swales and Renfield,” according to the critic, “are literary doubles who represent the critical, reflective

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reasoning faculty in Lucy and Mina respectively.”39 The parallel between the two sets of characters points to the fact that Mina’s life comes under the influence of something Renfield says or does in the same way as Lucy’s life is transformed by the revelations of the old man. Something is communicated which might not be understood and yet changes forever the life of the subject. Swales’ is the world of memory, the past that refuses to comply with the necessity of the modern world. His dialect is close to Middle English. With Swales, as with Mina, memory takes us “through the churchyard” (80). Whitby’s churchyard resembles a mouth in which “the stonework of the graves stretches out over the sandy pathway below” (80). Swales’ role is to reveal the lies of language and inscriptions. His account of George Canon’s suicide creates in Lucy an unexpected response. The date of the revelation corresponds to the anniversary of the burial, in July. Something returns then to haunt Lucy who was the true “destinataire” of the inscription. Her rebuke of the old man’s light tone when speaking of the dead speaks volumes: “she spoke her comment very gravely” (85). There is an implicit echo between her grave tone and the gravestone. A secret is transmitted without having been stated. And this secret conditions the life of its recipient. It is on the grave of the suicide that Lucy tells Mina “all over again of Arthur and their coming marriage” (86), thus condemning the vows of marriage to be a mere empty lie, similar to the lie on the tombstone which hides the emptiness of the grave. Symptomatically, at the same moment, the two bands start playing together: “a harsh waltz in good time,” the music of love and pleasure is interfered with by the sounds of moral retribution from the meeting of the Salvation Army. The cemetery which is like a mouth to the headland of Kettleness, but also the sea which is the real tomb of George Canon, continue to voice the hidden secret: “the big, grimlooking waves, that seemed dark themselves because the foam that toppled them was like snow, forced themselves in through the narrow mouth of the harbor—like a bullying man going through a crowd” (108). Dracula, a bullying man going through the crowds of London, is the past and the secret made image. With the anniversary of Canon’s death, something else returns which mimics and names the secret: a family disposition. Lucy starts sleepwalking, like her father before her. George Canon commits suicide to make sure his widowed mother would not inherit the insurance money she put on his life. Lucy, for her part, has inherited a disease that used to bring her father, asleep, to the edges of the cliffs. Sleepwalkers, like suicidal people, “fall over” (91). In Mina’s journal, the allusion to Lucy

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and her father’s sleepwalking is immediately followed, without a transition, by the mention of Lucy’s wedding to Arthur. In the very same way, her account of Swales’ revelation was followed by the description of her and Lucy, sitting on the grave talking about the wedding to come. Inheritance (George’s life insurance) and heredity (Lucy’s sleepwalking) loom up as shadows in Lucy’s life, and as shadows over her prospects of marriage. “Lucy is so sweet and sensitive that she feels influences more accurately than other people do,” Mina reckons (109). Unconscious cerebration, an effect of transgenerational haunting, has started spreading.40 Memory, that is Dracula, the embodiment of centuries of history, can now prey on Lucy. She has already started answering the call from the dead. Her first encounter with Dracula takes the shape of a dream. This dream duplicates the episode of the death of George Canon who killed himself and fell from the cliffs into the sea. Lucy dreams that she is a man drowning: “I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men,” Lucy explains to Mina (121). Her soul “floating in the air” has left her body and her body reenacts dramas that are not her own. This death by water is again voiced, this time by Lucy’s mother. It is the secret that Lucy inherits, a secret not her own. Twice Mrs. Westenra deflowers her daughter, robbing her of her innocence as she removes the white garlic flowers that protect her body from the invading presence of the vampire, that is, of memory. But death creeps into Lucy, precisely because her mother’s gesture allows her to sleep “soundly” (174), that is to feel in the sleep of her consciousness the sounds that make “the ear swell,” the sounds from another world, the world of the past and of the long dead ones. Her death is the complex reenactment of another death that borrows her body to vent its secret. Dying of the attack of the vampire that bleeds her dry, Lucy also gradually and slowly dies by drowning. It is a death by water that the bite of the vampire instills in her body: “my face,” Lucy complains, “is ghastly pale, and my throat pains me. It must be something wrong with my lungs, for I don’t seem ever to get air enough” (134). But the true moment of phantomatic transmission occurs with the death of the mother, reported in Lucy’s memorandum. Lucy’s secret is clearly her mother’s. The young woman receives from her mother “a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, unrecognized knowledge—a nescience.”41 This unrecognized knowledge is spoken, though indirectly. It can be heard in the “gurgling” in the mother’s throat (174), or in the figural distortions that crumple the text. Unable to decipher the

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message, Lucy is nonetheless somewhat aware of the process she is undergoing. Something is spoken in a foreign tongue. “There was some spell upon me,” Lucy feels (174). This spell is like the voice of a nightingale that was singing. The reference to Philomena and Procnee clearly alludes to secrets that cannot be uttered and spelled out and yet find a voice. The secret language for a secret message, the “spell” in a foreign tongue is given sound for sound: it is the beating of the mother’s heart: “There was some spell upon me and my dear mother’s poor body.” The spell weighs on her with all the weight of the mother’s body. “There is nothing heavier than a secret,” Lafontaine once said. The zeugma that distorts the logic of the sentence clearly links mother and spell. But the mother is dead. And yet, the spell spells out her heartbeat, in a continuous rhythm of monosyllables: “for her dear heart had ceased to beat.” The voice that tells the secret is a voice from beyond life and consciousness, a post-mortem communication which leaves Lucy “alone with the dead” (175), rather than alone with her dead mother. For there is more now than her mother’s body “laying over her.” There is a secret, transmitted and yet unacknowledged which, wolf-like, preys on her. As Abraham tells us, “the phantom [. . .] may [. . .] be deconstructed by analytic construction though only by fostering the impression that the patient has in fact not been the subject of analysis [. . .] The construction arrived at in this way bears no relation to the patient’s own topography but concerns someone else.”42 Lucy can only be seen as inhabited by another’s secret. She is only a mediating presence. Her changed appearance towards the end of her life demonstrates the presence of the phantom in her. She is “a tired child” (194). Harker, in his journal, confesses that when the Crew of Light penetrates Lucy’s crypt, he had the feeling that there was someone else among them (298). Van Helsing, aware that “it is the very obliquity of thought and memory which makes mental diseases such a fascinating study” (305), fights the vampire not in one individual but as a system of communication that can peregrinate in several directions. In order to get to Lucy’s crypt, and to get to the secret in the crypt, he tries “several skeleton keys” (298). In other words, he tries several ghostly scenarios, obliquely present in several characters, reaching beyond the individual psyche. Phantomatic transmission, like the modern technology the text deploys, explodes the notion of the individual. The memorandum stages the moment of transmission, but the substance transmitted is simply a lacuna, a mere gurgling that needs translating. Renfield and Mina tell us more about the secret conveyed to Lucy than she herself possibly could, were she to be alive still.

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An empty tomb, a suicide, drowned men and a sleepwalker, who inherits the family disease and relives in her dreams a death by drowning before she receives a mute secret from the lips of her dying mother, seem to link the secret to questions of transmission and inheritance. The vampire is concerned with the circulation of blood. Blood stands for genealogy and heredity. Blood is also inheritance. One’s blood determines inheritance, except if, as in the case of George Canon and his mother, there was bad blood between the parties. Lucy’s blood becomes rare and can no longer sustain her alive. What is in her blood that makes it impossible for her to inherit the fortune of her kin? Why does her mother skip her in her will? What secret circulates in the blood that Dracula recycles and dilutes between the protagonists? Renfield’s vivisection alone, Chapter XXI, can bring an answer as it stages and thus translates the mute secret transmitted to Lucy. The operation is directly connected with the method described by Van Helsing who “waits till the ear swells.” Renfield’s brain is opened “just above the ear” (331). The opening of his brain links him to Lucy whose crypt was also forced open and to Mina whose bedchamber is spied on by the group of men. “All chambers are alike to the doctor,” Van Helsing declares (335). They indeed all conflate to depict a unique family secret. Renfield’s dream unfolds like a film that gradually takes the spectators in. The skeleton key the Professor tries on the zoophagous patient opens up the “other stage,” the world of the unconscious. But on this other stage, a drama that is not Renfield’s has been enacted. The scene of Mina’s baptism of blood is contained within the dream of Renfield. It is the direct continuation of the scene where Dracula penetrates the madman’s cell and gradually invades the whole place. His cell becomes a brain cell, a recess where the unconscious power of the vampire is given full play. Mina’s room is the hidden chamber within his brain, the place where the secret is told. The scene is highly theatrical and bathed in artificial light, like a phantasmagoria: “the moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind the room was light enough to see” (336). “Nineteenth-century empiricists,” Castle writes, “frequently figured the mind as a magic lantern, capable of projecting the image-traces of past sensations onto the internal screen or backdrop of memory.”43 The fantasy inscribed in the brain cells and projected as on a screen of memory resembles a primal scene. It is very similar to the recurring scene that inhabits Frankenstein: a love scene is being witnessed and yet not understood. Quincey Morris, running across the lawn and hiding behind a yew tree (337), clearly occupies the position of the child in the scenario, as do Seward and Van

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Helsing in their voyeuristic stance. But the fantasy collides key terms which resonate in the whole of the text. “The attitude of Mina and Dracula, in Seward’s words, had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink” (336). Bodily fluids and secretions, milk, blood and semen are strangely associated and subverted in their essence. Blood takes the place of semen in the vampiric intercourse, but blood is as white as milk, as life sustaining as milk. Blood curdles like milk. When Lucy, for instance, is killed again by the Crew of Light, “a blood-curdling screech came from the open lips. [. . .] The mouth was smeared with crimson foam” (259). And it is blood that spurts out rather than semen when the phallic stake penetrates her heart. Van Helsing, rubbing the ears of the reader the wrong way, provides a clue. When he discovers that Dracula’s London residence is situated next to Seward’s asylum, he thinks of Lucy that he could have saved but did not: “the milk that is spilt cries not out afterwards” (281). In this strange distortion of the proverbial “to cry over spilt milk,” Lucy has become the milk that has been wasted. Is the family secret lodged in Lucy’s crypt, Renfield’s mind and Mina’s bedchamber the secret of an illegitimate child, a bastard who taints the bloodline of an entire family? Could it be the secret of a child on whom milk has been wasted as the purity of the blood was tainted? The allusion to illegitimacy seems to be confirmed in the nightmarish scene of Mina’s baptism of blood, which mimics a scene of conception. The vampiric mouth, according to Christopher Craft, is both phallic and like an orifice, “with its soft flesh barred by hard bone, its red crossed by white.”44 The vampiric act, the kiss, is therefore similar to a virgin birth: parthenogenesis looms in the text like a dream, a fantasy. The vampire breeds more vampires. Dracula’s wives are in fact his daughters. The scene in Mina’s bedroom displays a fantasy in which a mouth occupies several positions at the same time, being both male and female and out of which a new vampire is born. But the scene of conception, witnessed by the voyeuristic child (Quincey), takes place in the presence of the passive husband. The fantasy turns into a scene of adultery: Harker’s eyes are closed to what is happening under his very roof. In this scene of adultery, a daughter is conceived, a vampiric daughter that feeds on blood-like milk. Mina is both Dracula’s lover and daughter. On the wall of Renfield’s brain cell, Mina, like a magic shadow in a phantasmagoria, is the image-trace of a past drama not her own. Could she phantomatically reenact an adulterous affair from the past out of which a child was born? Mina, lodged in the crypt created by Renfield’s fantasy of incorporation, duplicates someone else’s secret. If we accept the idea that

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Swales and Mrs. Westenra’s enigmatic communication turn Lucy into a phantom carrier, and that parallely the secret also inhabits Renfield the madman at the crossroads of everybody’s lives and Mina the center of the system of communication, then there must be a link between the lies of inscriptions or naming, issues of blood, inheritance, adultery and suicide. The family secret of an illegitimate birth and adultery alone explains why Lucy cannot inherit the fortune of her family, and why it is passed directly to Arthur Goldaming. Bloodline and family name do not seem to coincide in the text, where secretly a child sucks dry the blood of a family. Dracula, he whose “child-brain that lie in his tomb for centuries” (404) has not yet grown up, is the haunting memory of that child. The secret had been communicated to Lucy without having been stated, by her mother of course, but also by Mr. Swales who awakens in her memory traces of a man who fell from the cliffs one night. The suicide was disguised as a sleepwalking accident. The impurity of the Westenra family line very narrowly threatened with mixed blood the blue blood of the noble house of Lord Goldaming. The vampire threat is a threat of sexual and therefore social promiscuity. Dracula, like desire, preys on victims of all classes and makes them equal, turns them all into vampires. Dracula does not believe in the purity of bloodlines or social hierarchy. Law and order, in the persons of a lawyer, Harker, and doctors, Van Helsing and Seward conjoin in a social fight for the preservation of a class system.

Quincey Harker The network system at the service of bourgeois and capitalist ideals of knowledge and power brings forth, with its triumphant efficacy, the ghosts of deeply buried fears. The secret of the Westenras is the secret of the bourgeois novel. These fears of illegitimacy and miscegenation are in fact intrinsically connected with the emergence of the nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie, in search of its own identity. Dracula is a bourgeois novel, at the service of a cause. The patriarchs ultimately triumph over evil, and London, the center of the capitalist world and the empire, is saved. Social synthesis is reaffirmed and the final scene, which presents all the characters as happily married and Mina as a traditional mother, reinforces the discourse on sexuality and the family. The narratives are thus channeled according to laws of finality and progression and the ghosts are put to rest, with their infinite whispers and secrets. Yet, Dracula remains a very anxious novel, unable to authenticate itself and believe in its own overt claims; it carries within, as if in a crypt, the

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secret of its own demise. Dracula is haunted by the plight of language according to which naming always produces a remainder. The objective world posited by language can never be the object. This is why the dead never cease to return in Dracula and why therefore there can be no closure. The last page of the novel ambiguously presents Quincey Harker, Mina’s child, as the consummation of a happy ending. Mina’s manifold text, endlessly condemned to reproduce itself and multiply, ends up in the real thing: the text of desire becomes the reality of reproduction. But Quincey Harker is a lie, an uneasy compromise. “Little Quincey,” Craft writes, “was luridly conceived in the veins of Lucy Westenra and then deftly relocated to the purer body of Mina.”45 In his veins flows the blood of all the characters of the story. In his veins therefore, the ink, the type and the voice of all the protagonists come to make sense and life. Yet his name embodies the very lie of language. The only blood that does not flow in him is precisely, as Carol Senf remarks, that of Quincey Morris, after whom he is named.46 “Naming,” Hartman writes, “does have a spectral dimension if we seek to perpetuate someone by calling a child after him. It makes the child a revenant.”47 Quincey Harker is the ghost of Quincey Morris who was not laid to rest in peace but called up in language and condemned to an empty tomb in words. Quincey Morris is nowhere to be found behind the name the child of the Crew of Light inherits. The text duplicates the initial crisis: Quincey Harker’s name is like George Canon’s grave. Canon’s is an empty grave that belies the inscription carved in stone. The child’s name is an empty name that belies the plenitude of signs. The child is condemned to become the phantom carrier of an improperly buried corpse. The undead have not done walking. Haunting continues. If Dracula as a character on the keyboard of Mina’s typewriter was intimately connected to the network discourse of 1900, to the proliferation of information and the new technology, what kind of spectral tale is promised at the end of Dracula? Around 2010, in the age of personal computers and the Internet, the cursor carries the curse. Cyber-fiction is the promise of a post-human era. “Perhaps, unwisely the brain is subcontracting many of its core functions, creating a series of branch economies that may one day amalgamate and mount a management buy-out.”48

6 The Raising of the Dead: Art and Melancholy

Following the instinct for rhythms that has chosen him, the poet does not deny seeing a lack of proportion between the means let loose and the result. —Mallarmé, Le Mystère dans les lettres With Dracula, as with the monster of Frankenstein or the prophecy of The Castle of Otranto, the past remains undead, encrypted in words that resist signification and are taken away or disguised before they are profaned in language exchanges. The past does not pass by and the burial does not hold. Gothic writing betrays the presence of haunting melancholy traces in language. The Gothic is the symptom of impossible mourning. Something refuses to be conveyed in the flow of words. It insists on and defies interpretation. It cuts through the narrative line and undoes the concatenating of signifiers in discourse. “As the time in which we live is the time of our discourse, the alien, retarded or vanishing speech of melancholy people leads them to live within a skewed time sense . . . The before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past toward a goal,” Kristeva writes.1 In the Gothic a magnified sense of the past pervades all the dimensions of psychic continuity. Similarly, melancholy, ruling language by dint of primary processes, takes the subject back to a space and a time that precede the symbolic. Melancholy in language is a negation of language. Undigested lumps of the past of the subject and of the life of the object are carried, unmediated, in the flow of language, against the logic of discourse. Melancholy is incommunicable and its message is the excommunicated. As the other of language, it requires another language, material, directly expressive and immediate, which would be the guarantee of the existence of the world 133

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in spite of words. Perhaps it is necessary in this last chapter, to consider the malady behind the symptom—melancholy behind the Gothic. How can one reconcile the need to communicate, which is the core of artistic expression, and the impossibility to say, which is the essential issue of melancholy? How can melancholy both inhabit and inhibit creativity and art? This chapter explores how photography illustrates the mechanism at the heart of the elaboration of the crypt. In its attempt to escape the plight of symbolization and to blur the boundaries between life and death, between the present and the past, photography is central to the question of art and melancholy. Photography mimics the moves of a fantasy of incorporation. Aware that words have failed them, Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida and the main protagonist of Proof, a film by Jocelyn Moorhouse2 heal or perhaps hide the wound of an irrevocable loss through the medium of photography. We will also see how Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse also finds in visual art what words cannot give her: “a mother again.”

Photography and magic restoration: Barthes’s Camera Lucida Nadar in his autobiography recalls how Balzac refused to be photographed. The daguerreotype was for him an instrument of slow death, producing a subtle and somewhat imperceptible torture not unlike flaying. According to his theory, “all physical bodies are made up entirely of layers of ghostlike images, an infinite number of leaflike skins laid on top of one another.” Because of the spectral nature of the body, “every time one (has) his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers (is) removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures entail the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life.”3 Reflecting on the mortiferous essence of photography, Nadar wonders: “Was each precious layer lost forever or was the damage repaired through some more or less instantaneous process of rebirth?”4 Balzac never directly answered the question, yet his picture finally taken, adorned with multiple rippling layers of skin is, like all photographs, a testimony of the immediate certainty of rebirth through lifelikeness. The spectrum of all photographs is spectral, a ghostlike presence given immediate life. Photography in its instantaneity takes over where language fails. This clearly appears in Barthes’ autobiographical project, which seems to demonstrate increased distrust of language as a means of approaching

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the self. In “Deliberation,” Barthes explores his ambiguous impulse to keep a journal to consign and condense his sense of life and death. But the text remains a mere deliberation and ends up with a disowning of language. About one of his attempted journal entries, which reports an evening at an exhibition of photos by Boudinet, Barthes writes, in between brackets, as if to retrieve this piece from the project: (Rereading: this bit gave me a distinct pleasure, so vividly did it revive the sensations of that evening; but curiously reading it over, what I remembered was what was not written, the interstices of notation: for instance the gray of the rue de Rivoli while I was waiting for the bus; no use trying to describe it now, anyway, or I’ll lose it again instead of some other silenced sensation, and so on, as if resurrection always occurred alongside the thing expressed: role of the Phantom, of the Shadow.)5 In its very principle, language promises resurrection but only alongside of the object. The object itself is always somehow “missed” in the act of saying. The speaking subject is therefore doomed to celebrate some funeral, mourning for “the referent, for beauty, for meaning, for home, for some stable terms of orientation, because these losses are always already there, as soon as one uses language.”6 Camera Lucida, Barthes’ last book and unexpectedly most intimate autobiographical work, opens up where the parenthesis from “Délibérations” closed, with a photograph of a blue curtain by Boudinet, as if Barthes was still tracking the thing beside the shadow, but this time through another medium. To the speaking subject in his/her incessant mourning, photography, if “it is explored not as a question but as a wound,” offers an instantaneous solution, that of phantomatic and phanstasmatic resurrection.7 It is this fantasy of miraculous preservation of the lost object that is shared by two mourners: Barthes, a spectator who never took any pictures, and Martin, the blind protagonist of Proof, a photographer who never could see any pictures.

Photography and the fantasy of pure referentiality Early on Barthes notices that “the photographer’s organ is not his eye . . . but his finger,” his index pointing at the world.8 Photography cannot escape pure deixis. “It is the antiphon of ‘look,’ ‘see,’ ‘here it is.’”9 It shares in common with deixis, an inherent poverty of signification. Its interpretation is reduced to the mere recognition: “this is what it is.”

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Photography is a message without a code, as if the link between the signifier and the signified was no longer an arbitrary substitution but a mere recording. Photography functions much like an index: the sign is contiguous with the object. The finger of the photographer pointing at the world triggers the gesture of pointing in the viewer who in turn has the world under his finger. Where language cannot authenticate itself, photography seems to be the immediate warranty of existence. This is the reason why Martin takes pictures, “as proof that what I sense is what you saw.” More than any other medium, photography embodies the dream of recovering the “sensible” beyond language. To indicate, the finger either on the trigger of the camera or on the photograph, does not belong to the order of language. It is not submitted to the failings of the system of signification but on the contrary presents a direct access to the world of experience. A photograph, explains Barthes is not metaphoric. “It has been” is what the critic calls the undeniable “noeme” of the photograph. Someone has seen the referent in flesh and blood. The photograph substitutes designation for signification. Because it is so immediately deictic, photography seems to cancel death and be the locus of a resurrection. It generates fantasies of rebirth and imaginary scenarios that stage the fulfillment of a desire to immortalize the love object. Didi-Huberman in “The Index of the Absent Wound”10 shows how the history of photography is inseparable from “the historic impetus that rendered the shroud of Turin visible.” The sudarium becomes the proof of the resurrection of Jesus Christ only when it is turned into photographic proof. The picture then becomes the thing, the object, the sudarium, rather than the medium of its conveyance. Photography, unlike language, is hardly perceived as a mediating presence. In May 1895, Secondo Pia immersed in the chemical bath his last attempt to produce a clear photograph of the shroud and suddenly saw “at the moment the negative image took form,” a face that had never been seen before on the shroud. Photography only could produce the miracle: “the holy shroud became the negative imprint of the body of Christ, its luminous index miraculously produced and miraculously inverted in the very act of resurrection henceforth to be conceived of in photographic terms,” comments Didi-Huberman.11 From then on, a scenario is played out: stains become visible to the naked eye on the shroud where there were none before, and a rhetorical machine is put into place. The stains must be bloodstains. It must be the blood of Christ because nothing made of the hand of man could have impregnated the cloth. Therefore Christ must be dead and resurrected because it is a miracle to

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have those stains vividly present in the cloth. Condensed in the “proof” of the unexpected face in the chemical bath is the idea that the photo constitutes proof of the existence of the object. Christ was there and he died. But in the idea of proof in turn are telescoped the notions of reality, life and truth. It is real so it must be true. And also, as Barthes reminds us, “by attesting that the object has been real, the photo surreptitiously induces the belief that it is alive, because of the illusion that makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superiority.”12 The lifelikeness of a picture is just as good as life. There is no gap between the object represented and the object that has been. Photography becomes the expression of a fantasy of Referentiality, which culminates in the certainty that resurrection took place. A mise-en-scène is set in motion by the image, a drama to catch the desire of the spectator. It is of the essence of the index to trigger action. Pierce, for instance, explains that the symptom is the paradigm of the index precisely because “it locates on a semiotic plane an illness in the process of acting.”13 In the case of the shroud, the symptom inherent in the indexical value of the negative is that of seeing stains where there were none before, which develops into a desire to name the substance and identify the actor as Christ. Didi-Huberman then shows how the fantasy of referentiality culminates in the recreation of the conditions of Christ’s death. The photograph becomes the ground for experimental verification. Death being verified is also transcended because a true, real photograph is alive. Photography is “vera icona.” In essence it produces the miracle of contact. An image impregnates the paper. No wonder that in Turin it is in front of a photo of the shroud rather than the shroud itself that pilgrims kneel down.

The punctum Potentially, photography as “the emanation of the referent” turns all spectators into Saint Thomas touching the wound of Christ.14 But for Barthes the wound is not only something one can touch as proof of the existence of a scene, a moment or a person. It is something that touches one, opening up a space in the spectator, a space like a void or a crypt in which a detail already in the picture and yet invisible suddenly comes to lodge itself. A “sting, speck, cut, little hole,” the “punctum” is the “accident that pricks me, but also bruises me, is poignant to me,” Barthes explains.15 The punctum creates in the photograph a “blind field” which doubles our partial vision. It is as if the object in the picture was given, in the punctum, a chance to live beyond the frame. The punctum, this addition to what is already there, this pure supplement,

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is the sure sign of the resurrection of the object in the picture. Whereas everything that happens in the photo dies absolutely once the frame is passed beyond, the punctum fantasmatically gives the object a life outside of the picture. It haunts the picture like an uninvited guest or ghost, invisible and yet blatantly present. Analyzing a family portrait by Van der Zee, Barthes is arrested by a detail: could it be the old fashioned strapped shoes? No, the punctum, the slightly disturbing sense that something else matters, is somewhere else. It is the necklace that jars in the picture. The detail that arrests his attention brings out of the picture the woman in her Sunday best, the dutiful daughter who has retreated behind her mother. This woman becomes the anchoring point of a little drama, which dragging her in full light also brings forth, fantasmatically, other ghosts. The necklace is the same as the one worn by the deceased maiden aunt who spent her life looking after her mother. After her death, explains Barthes, the necklace “remained shut up in a family box of old jewelry.”16 Shut up in the family box are not only old jewels, but also the maiden aunt, dead and buried. And with her all the other dead in the family box. All are brought back to the surface by the image of the other maiden shut up in the box-like body of Van der Zee’s camera. The spectrum has become a living dead or rather a haunt for specters in the blind field beyond the photo. The punctum, then, functions like a fantasy. Victor Burgin shows how it reveals a “situation in an image.”17 “The highly cathected image-fragment,” explains Burgin, “stands in for a narrative.” The narrative, condensed into a laconic formulation: “shut up in a box” is a sequence of images, a scenario, and therefore a fantasy. Like the fantasy of referentiality whose scenario Didi-Huberman identified in the photo of the sudarium as paradigm of photography, the punctum “launches desire beyond what it permits us to see.”18 The punctum sets an act into motion, like a production in the cinematographic sense of the term. The punctum in the Van der Zee photo produces, one could even say gives birth to, the mother, also shut up in a family box for eternity, but no, since here she is ultimately found again in the necklace as punctum. Absent from all the pictures offered to the reader’s eye in Camera Lucida, she is the omnipresent “reference” behind all the images that arrest the son’s eye and wound him, ever so gently. The paradox of the punctum lies in its metonymical force and its semiotic power: the punctum is the phantom, the shadow alongside the thing represented. The punctum irradiates in the game of infinite substitutions. “Here she is,” real, true and alive, in the photo of the Winter Garden, but also in the arches, like giant ribs, of the Alhambra photographed by Charles Clifford: “I want

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to live here,” says Barthes.19 Here she is again, in the picture of the Hungarian violinist in which Barthes recognizes “with (his) whole body” the straggling villages and the coarse grain of the dirt road.20 There she is, alive and mourning for her dead son, an undead object contemplating the death of the subject, in the picture of Nicaragua by Koen Wessing.21 In the picture of the Winter Garden, the photo of the mother’s childhood, the little production that animates the object of desire, and thus reanimates her, becomes, in Rabaté’s formulation “a fantasy of reproduction.”22 The photograph is like an “umbilical cord”23 linking a son to his “feminine child.”24 In a moment of endocryptic identification, the son has become the mother of his own mother. He has incorporated the mother as child. Miraculously kept alive and preserved by the chemical bath, she lives in the blind field of the punctum as in a crypt.

The-Proof-according-to-Saint-Thomas-seeking-totouch-the-resurrected-Christ The photograph is in essence the emanation of the referent. “Rays emanate from the object to touch me,” Barthes writes.25 Light is the medium of photography and light functions then like a skin. It is what allows the object to touch me with its own rays, even and especially the object I have lost. “The thing of the past in its immediate radiations has really touched the surface which in its turn, my gaze will touch.”26 Photography then is a subject and an object touched by the same light and magically linked. One does not need to see the photo for the “miracle” to happen. The photo, Barthes also says, is always somehow invisible. In the blind field of desire, there is light, skin and touch. This is the secret photographic world of Martin, the compulsive blind photographer of Proof. Giving a summary of the film is actually an arduous task. Nothing much happens in this very bare, minimalist film. Two plots intertwine. One, the secret elliptical one, played in flashbacks only and thus dipped in the past, concerns Martin and the mother he lost when he was five. The other could be described as a triangular situation between two men and a woman. Martin, a 30-year-old blind man lives an extremely controlled life from which chance and the possibility of the unexpected have more or less been eliminated. Martin always goes to the same places along the same avenues. Nothing touches his existence, certainly not liveliness and life. He lives with his dog and is being helped by Celia, a housekeeper who is obviously in love with him but to whom he

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remains perfectly impervious. Martin uses Celia to describe the numerous pictures he takes on his walks. Martin’s life seems to concentrate exclusively on his obsession with photography. He documents every moment of his existence. One day he accidentally trips over a garbage can in a blind alley behind his house and hurts a stray cat. Andy, who works in the kitchen of the nearby restaurant, sees the incident and blames him for his indifference and carelessness. Together, they take the cat to the veterinarian clinic. The cat survives the accident, and Andy becomes Martin’s friend. Martin has him describe his pictures for him. This is the beginning of a mute crisis in the impenetrable world of Martin. The shell behind which he protects himself (or is it a crypt) from life, warmth and feelings, slowly cracks. Celia becomes jealous of the relationship the two men share. She seduces Andy to prove to Martin he is not to be trusted. Martin, feeling betrayed and abandoned again, rejects them both. At the end, Andy comes back. Martin realizing that no one and nothing ever completely says the truth, has him describe the first photo he ever took as a child, a photo kept in a safe. It is the photo of the scene his mother used to describe to him daily. We learn in flashbacks, that, as a child, Martin could never hear the gardener raking the leaves in the garden, and he thought his mother was lying to him as a revenge for his infirmity when she was telling him to concentrate harder so as to hear his footsteps on the leaves. Andy too describes a gardener raking leaves. The two narrative lines, the open one in which Andy and Martin are the main protagonists, in the present of narration, and the subterranean one imbued in the past like the melancholy plot which stages the mother and the son in an impossible relationship, finally conjoin as the words of the mother are made present and actual in Andy’s mouth. Proof, like Camera Lucida is about unfulfilled mourning for the maternal object. Purely referential, literal and anti-metaphorical, photography makes it possible for the impossible to happen: it brings to the subject, here Martin, the certainty that the mother is not dead. Photography is Martin’s silent protest against the world of words. Short, terse and literal, Martin’s language is dead language. Language is reduced to mere labeling. Verbal exchanges, stripped of any personal marks, are limited to the expression of physical needs only. Martin actually pays people to describe his pictures for him in ten words maximum. Words from the mother tongue might harbor the mother’s lie or worse still, force the subject to give her up as real presence and accept her as mere metaphor. Words then must be contained and controlled. Martin is language-proof, closed up like an oyster. Martin’s extreme retentiveness

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clearly illustrates that he has not introjected the loss in mourning. Introjection is the process that allows the subject to enter the house of mourning in the recognition that the object is lost precisely because it is acknowledged as lost and thus can exist in signs. As we have seen already, melancholy is the refusal to speak of the dead, because to speak of the dead is to acknowledge that they are no longer present in reality but that they are granted a symbolic existence in the words that represent them.27 One can only speak in the absence of the object, and words are the substitutes of the object. Representation excludes presentation. It inhabits the subject who remains full of the object. In order to speak, one must accept the void, the disappearance of the object. The loss is digested, when the object disappears as object to be reborn as signs. Kristeva formulates this idea as follows: “I have lost an essential object, my mother, but no, I have found her again in signs.”28 The mechanism at work in language is exposed in “but no,” a negation by which the love object is signified as it is displaced and figured. In melancholy, the negation is denied, continues Kristeva: “I have not lost an object and I do not need to find it in signs.”29 Melancholy is a defect of mourning, when the lost object cannot be metaphorized. Martin’s sparse communications constantly seem to deny communication in its principle. When Andy parts from him with a light-hearted “See you around,” Martin’s answer, “So to speak,” symptomatically points to the figurativeness of all language and to the inability for Martin to fit in the symbolic. His language is purely literal. With Martin’s literal stance on language, we come to recognize the catachrestic dimension of language. Carrying death, verbal language is condemned to endless metaphorical driftings to hide its original lie. To endorse metaphoricity is to become a subject in language and thus to repudiate the maternal body in the acknowledgment of separation. The melancholic is a primary narcissist, and his love object is loved only insofar as and as long as the otherness of the object can be repressed. Melancholy is regressive; it takes the subject back to the non-space before language where “I and you were not perceived as having hard edges.”30 Because the mourner cannot take it, cannot swallow the loss and the separation in its inevitability, he resorts to a fantasy. Introjection is a process, but incorporation is a fantasy. It is, in Abraham and Torok’s words, a “fantasy of nonintrojection.”31 The melancholic resorts to magic: he literally takes in the object, unprocessed, incorporated and undead. And the result is immediate: the not-yet self thus gains omnipotent control over the object not yet separated from it. The melancholic substitutes the magic of the regressive “not yet” to the impossible acknowledgment of the “no longer.” The object thus

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recuperated is given permanent residence within and yet beside the subject, both preserved and repressed.32 Martin, unlike Frankenstein, does not give birth to a monster who fulfills the secret agenda of suppressing all obstacles between him and his “undead” mother. Unlike Ambrosio, he does not commit matricide to make sure the castrating mother of his adult age will not interfere in his love affair with the mother of his infancy, hidden in a secret vault beyond reach and accessible only through the forbidden reactivation of incestuous desire. Yet Martin too is a cemetery guard. Armed with a camera, he paces in front of the vault where he has buried alive the mother of his childhood. The photographer is a cryptographer, constantly reinscribing in sepia the magic of an act that catches life in an eternal present.33 Martin’s compulsion to document life in snapshots is his secret incest, his monster and the sign of the presence in him of a melancholic crypt. Photography is the symptom of Martin’s malady of impossible grief. Symbolically, the pharmacy is the place where he has his pictures developed, regularly, as if he was renewing a prescription. Through the camera, Martin rediscovers the forbidden pleasures of tactile contact. Light has become a carnal medium, the skin he shares with anyone and anything that has been photographed. The film, presenting flashbacks of Martin as a child touching light as warmth on the windowpane and the kinesthetic memory of his fingers caressing the face and neck of his mother asleep, establishes a parallel between desire and the photographic medium. Martin’s organ is his finger pressing the trigger. The clicking sound of the trigger is the very thing to which his desire clings: “an abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layers of the pose.”34 With his finger on the trigger, Martin inhabits the world like the body of the mother of omnipotent ascendancy. It is on his fingertip, the skin of his finger as the space of the interface with the skin of the mother of infancy, or rather in the space of contact between the clicking trigger and his index, that the mother is kept alive, in-corporated. In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes two ways of being in the world. Space can be visitable or habitable. Visitable space is incidental and accidental. Habitable space on the other hand is where one is sure to have been or to go. “This longing to inhabit is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time and to carry me back to somewhere in myself.”35 Now, continues Barthes, “Freud says of the maternal body that there is no place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.” Martin’s finger is his second sight. Whereas Andy merely visited the waiting room of the veterinarian clinic, Martin inhabited it, fantasmatically with the

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second sight his blindness conferred on him. The clinic of course is the place where dead cats can come to life again, an analogon of the crypt. The room therefore was like a womb, humming and throbbing. The linoleum was like the grain of an aged skin, and the defective light was like a beating heart, flickering in diastolic and systolic intermittences. Martin takes pictures of what touches him and what he has touched, what therefore awakens in him the mother of archaic domination. The semiotic means of access to this mother is preverbal semiology, tactile, olfactory and auditory. The photographs that Andy must describe as sparingly as possible are just “proof” that he, Martin, was there and that therefore the object of his desire was there, possessed and not yet or even never to be separated from the not-yet self. But second sight excludes sight: “fingers are the same as eyes, you can’t touch whenever you want” says the disturbing mother of the symbolic. Eyes mark the distance between the subject and the object. Eyes, unlike fingers, belong to the symbolic. So the photographer remains blind and somewhat silent. The mother in the symbolic is the mother that can lie. Words are lies. The fantasmatic preservation of the mother in the magic formula of photography runs as follows: I was there, therefore she was there too, under my finger, against my skin, and I can prove it because a photo never lies. But Martin goes even further: if he takes pictures, he explains to Andy, it is in order to “catch her in her lie.” Catch her in her lie is the open sesame, the magic word that opens in the subject a crypt in which to bury alive the object of his desire and at the same time preserve it from the outside. It functions like a “cryptonym.”36 Polysemic, it expresses multiple meanings through a single phonetic structure. One of the meanings remains shrouded. Some words are the carriers of the fantasy. Because they would give access to the private cinema of the subject too easily, they must remain unuttered, and therefore are approached through substitution. Cryptonymy is a metonymy of words, explain Abraham and Torok: “the contiguity that presides over this procedure is by nature not a representation of things but arises from the lexical contiguity of the various meanings of the same words, that is allosemes.”37 For Martin, the object of desire is the mother represented in the flashback, lying, asleep, passive under his fingers. “Lying” is therefore the word that must be buried with her in the crypt, and yet not completely forgotten. Lying or not telling the truth hides in the folds of its homophone, lying or reclining. Words are lies, “we all lie a little, but not always,” Andy says. So the mother, lying in her bed, who told her five-year-old boy the words “I am going to die soon” is not dead. Her son can catch her in her lie in

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a picture, because pictures are not submitted to the failings of signification. “Lie” is also a synonym for “die,” and die is actually somewhat paronomastically inscribed in lie. But “catch” in “to catch her in her lie,” is vivid and fantasmatic. It cancels the inertia of “lie.” The mourner, in a word and a gesture (“catch”), prevents the inevitable. The mother is caught alive, caught before she falls into death, and preserved, as the mother that lies and rests, in a safe within and beside the subject. The fantasy of incorporation, the magic by which he saved her from death is encrypted in a formula in which language is taken literally. There, words become the actual thing in which to hide the object. In the crypt of “lie”, life (mother asleep) and death, betrayal (“I am going to die”) and truth coexist, in a sort of status quo. The proof that he caught her in her lie is, of course, in the safe where the picture in its old shroud-like envelope is preserved. The photo in the safe reenacts and literalizes the conditions of the fantasy. It is a safe one can approach only in blindness: Martin blindfolds Celia before opening it. And even then, he opens it only to confirm its retentive nature and take money out. Once truly opened, once the picture is taken out, in the last scene of the film, the safe in fact becomes useless. The safe is full, and of course this is the sign that the coffin of the mother is empty. “It is hollow,” says the five-year-old Martin tapping on the coffin of his mother, in a flashback. Mother is not there, not dead. Neither is she in the cemetery where the carved name and dates on the tombstone are also “hollow” signs, as if emptied of meaning and in any case emptied of the thing they are supposed to represent. The mother’s tomb, like Canon’s tomb in Dracula, is an empty tomb, condemned to bear witness to the lies of memorial inscriptions. The opening scene of the film is also a telltale sign of the fantasmatic solution Martin finds to the scandal of death. The cat unduly stolen from the realm of the living when Martin bumping into a garbage can buries it under a heap of refuse, turns out to be undead. It is resuscitated first by Martin’s touch and then by the veterinarian. Death can be undone. But the secret of the unholy preservation of the mother caught in her lie must be kept from all intruding eyes. Martin therefore shuts himself up to the world, for fear of losing the mother in him. Martin must refuse life in order to preserve the life of the undead in and on him. “Perhaps the camera loves us, it can’t be Martin,” says Celia to Andy. Taking pictures is the way Martin finds to keep the mother under his finger and to perpetuate the clandestine pleasure after her loss. Only the camera can love. It is like an impossible finger-eye. But there is also Celia,

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the keeper of the house of impossible mourning. Celia is the prop in Martin’s personal theater. She is a mourner herself, having, like Martin, lost her mother when she was still very young. But Celia, who is drawn to Martin like moth to light of which significantly Martin is deprived, can eroticize the loss of the object. The mother is recoverable as erotic object in the other. Celia too, as a photographer, is prey to fantasies of resurrection and alchemical reveries. But her compulsion becomes art and transmutation as she constructs Martin into the arch “spectrum” and therefore sublime erotic object. Martin is everywhere photographed on the wall of her shrine-like living room, which turns him into a voyeur, that is, somehow a sighted person. The light that emanates from the surface of his blind eyes touches the eyes of the spectator who is also the spectacle of the multiplied eyes in the pictures. Looked at from all sides, by those unseeing eyes, one becomes the object of the gaze, paradoxically revived by photography. Celia produces symbolic sight as the equivalent of what is lacking, thus insuring her entrance into the universe of signs and creation. But Celia’s transmutation of grief into mourning is caught up in Martin’s regressive attempts at narcissistic recovery. Celia as keeper of the house of mourning is the warrant of the existence of the crypt. Her part as prop in the drama that is reenacted on “the other scene” is to be the living memory of the mother caught in her lie who pretended she was going to die in order to “punish [Martin] for being blind.” Her role is precisely to lie, to trick him, moving objects around and blurring the contours of his world. She is what Barthes in Camera Lucida called the disturbing mother, the unheimlich mother who tries to precipitate the subject into the process of individuation and to force his entrance into the symbolic. She is the forbidding mother who says: “fingers are the same as eyes, you can’t touch when you want.” As long as Celia lies, the real mother, the one on the tip of his fingers, the skin-mother is still alive. Celia embodies the aggressiveness Martin feels toward the lost object: I love the object and therefore take it in myself. But I hate it also, and my hatred turns the other within me into a bad self. I am bad and should be punished. Together with the libidinal and narcissistic object of desire, he embedded in himself its “sublime components, which become his necessary tyrannical judge.”38 Celia is the projection of the bad self and the embodiment of the identification with the bad phallic (especially when armed with the pipe of the vacuum cleaner) mother that Martin needs in order to make sure that the mother in the crypt is still there, although hidden. And to that mother in the safe, Martin remains faithful, unable to touch any other skin, particularly

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not Celia’s. He cannot desire her, that is, accept that the first object is always lost and substituted for, however imperfectly in future cathexes. That would mean that “fingers are eyes,” and that the mother in the symbolic has triumphed. As long as fingers are fingers, the process of individuation has not started. It is, of course, the homoerotic relation with Andy that reveals the first cracks in the crypt, brings the first tears and betrays the unsustainable position of melancholy. This relation nonetheless clearly demonstrates that there is no way out of melancholy. If the crypt is perceptible only when cracked, nonetheless, the bond between Andy and Martin does not quite free the mother. It testifies to the subject’s inability to form libidinal bonds with female objects, that is, with substitutes for the mother. She remains irreplaceable. Yet, Andy becomes an object of desire under Martin’s fingers. This clearly appears in the series of snapshots Celia discovers. The repeated click of the camera is the thing to which Martin’s desire clings, and each click brings under the photographer’s index a new piece of Andy. Celia, reconstituting Andy’s face in the mosaic of pictures, also follows the path of Martin’s finger along the curves of the mouth, nose and neck. Andy becomes “habitable” space for Martin. What Martin allows himself to touch through the noise and lens of the camera, he fondles also in the car, protected by the anonymous darkness of the drive in, and stimulated previously by Andy’s descriptive commentary of the B movie, while Andy is away, looking for “food for blind people.” In the car, Martin encounters Andy’s intimate world; a hard prickly bauble of a dinosaur, the soft furry cover of the steering wheel like a sheath, and then of course the actual condom in its little wrapping. Opening up a world of erotic possibilities, Andy introduces Martin to the symbolic. Martin can then utter his first lie, at the police station: when he grabbed the wheel during the copsand-robbers chase he had simply “forgotten” he was blind. Martin’s first lie is also his first laugh and the occasion of the first tears (of joy) in his eyes. It is of this lie that the mother truly dies. Photography as preservative fantasy dies when Andy introduces Martin to the movies, to the universe of moving images and to the continuum of time. “In the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence, it does not cling to me, it is not a specter” explains Barthes.39 Photography is melancholy because it flows from presentation to retention. The cinematic image flows forward, always already in the future. The cinema animates and cannot reanimate or mummify.

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Getting rid of Celia after the photograph proves that she, like Andy, lied and is also, paradoxically, partly letting go of the mother in the crypt. Love objects can betray because they have a life of their own. They must also have a death of their own. “We all lie a little, but not all the time,” explains Andy. Martin encounters the other when he encounters time and inconsistency. The other is betrayal. The other never stays transfixed and motionless like an image under the subject’s finger. The other is “not I,” uncontrollable. It is impervious to the omnipotent domination of the primary narcissist. Martin then confronts his own life as lie when Andy says “your life is the truth, have pity on us.” He becomes a subject in language, opens the safe, takes out the photograph into the light and agrees to let go of a part of himself: he did not catch the mother in her lie. On the contrary, what he discovers now in the first picture—which is also, of course, the last one (because there is no need for photographic evidence any longer)—is not only what his mother described to him, that is the gardener, a pile of leaves and a rake, but also an old and “kind” gardener.40 Andy introduces affect in language or rather points to the affect contained in the picture. The picture has become a work of art. The photo conveys a kindness that appears over and beyond its intention. The kindness of the gardener, like a punctum, transcends the limits of the medium. “Kind” does not simply describe the gardener. It connotes and thus opens in discourse, in the discourse of the image as well as in the interpretative discourse, a depth in which desire comes to be inscribed. This is the real turning point of the story. Words can feel, and Martin can start feeling in language. Symbolically, Martin’s last words are “I will be at the restaurant tomorrow.” No longer “a dweller in truncated time,” Martin is no longer “a dweller in the imaginary realm.”41 There can be yesterday and tomorrow only in language conceived as metaphorical process. “Tomorrow” captures the essence of language as signification and representation. “Tomorrow” opens up the possibility of a “communication of empty mouths” and thus of introjection: the original oral void is put into words to symbolize it. Martin can sit down at the table in the restaurant and eat. “Tomorrow,” the long postponed funerary feast can take place.42

Art and elegy: Affect in language or “the Semiotic Agitation within the Symbolic” (Kristeva) The photograph of the Shroud of Turin “shines forth as a beacon of symbolic law.”43 It is the “image” of the blood of Christ, a relic in the

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altar where a symbolic communion of empty mouths can take place. Barthes’ punctum, the only thing that is pure image in the photo, becomes Camera Lucida, a semi-autobiographical work where Barthes gives himself away, a subject constituted in language. The work of art ensures the rebirth of its author or reader. What the melancholic discovers, once grief can start its healing work, is that mourning too is the promise of a resurrection, that of the subject, in signs. Like Martin who by his question, “kind?” opens up the possibility of the future in the work of art, I would like to revert to the process at work in this adjective. “Kind” flourishes in Andy’s commentary, which explodes the terms of the contract: he no longer limits his description of the picture to ten stark denotative words. Andy speaks of what is not there in the picture and yet is the picture. “Kind” “must be the photo,” he says, as a form of excuse when Martin catches the word in its rebound. “Kind?” is Martin’s “mobled queen?,” which as we saw in our reading of Lyotard’s Discours, Figure, corresponds to the moment of Hamlet’s Oedipal truth.44 In the same way as “mobled queen” is a “fragment of the space of the primary unconscious that leaves its trace in the space of discourse,” “kind” is “the mother where she was not expected.”45 It is not simply the gardener who is kind, but the photo that says it all of the relationship between a son and his mother, but says it all mutely, blindly, between the lines and beyond all intention. The mother is in the photo, in its kindness. The photo no longer documents or proves anything. And yet it performs the work of truth when in the interstices of its intentionality, primal and unnamable experiences come to be inscribed. Art is “consolatio” and solace. It is an attempt at reparation, even though or even as it plays havoc with the forces of order of the symbolic. It is by nature elegiac, that is to say that it ensures survival through signs. If haunted writing is the mark of what in signification fails to signify, if, therefore, haunted writing is that which in language undermines its communicability, an alternative move nevertheless seems to emerge from within the very forces of chaos in language. Haunted writing necessarily acknowledges the rules it transgresses, and within these rules, the dead are conjured up, that is to say mastered in signs. An elegy is the work of mourning by which the dead are remembered, monumentized and thus given a place in the symbolic. The elegy marks the ultimate triumph of “conveyability” when signs can correspond to primal, unnamable experiences. “The Voice,” a poem Thomas Hardy wrote after the death of his wife, perfectly illustrates how “creation” also turns haunted writing into the

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art of conjuring the dead and warding them off.46 This idea is in fact very close to the goal Ann Radcliffe had set herself when she conceived The Mysteries of Udolpho as a tale that could “sustain” the sorrow of the mourner, that is both give support to it and alleviate it while maintaining it. Ghosts in signs are the guarantee of sublimation, however imperfect. “The Voice” follows the psychic scheme of a traditional elegy. The poet is drowned in sorrow, unable to accept the loss of the loved object. The first stanza is purely negative and steeped in an irrecoverable past. The refusal of mourning manifests itself in the dialogic form in which the dead is even called upon to address the poet. This is the meaning of the empty echo on the first line: “how you call to me, call to me.” The second “call” does not simply betray, in the echo, the void left by the death of the loved object, but also, in the shadow of the imperative form it throws on the text, it discloses the secret desire to erase the scandal of death by the magic of a call from the dead. Remembering, though, is blocked by the impossibility to feel the dead. The second stanza tries to obtain photographic proof of the former existence of the loved one. The woman remains an object of knowledge, the object of the gaze, and memory purely intellectual. But gradually, in the third stanza, rhythm creeps in the text over and beyond the mournful binary form of echoes (“call to me,” “all to me” or “view you then,” “knew you then”). The rhythm is primarily graphic. In a succession of “w” and “m” (lines 10 and 11), it inscribes the woman in the text precisely at the point where her disappearance is reaffirmed: she is “heard no more again far or near.” This graphic rhythm operates a form of engraving beyond and even against the grain of signification. The text becomes elegiac rebirth as the engraving in signs cancels the intellectual certainty of death. The voice that is liberated in the last stanza is therefore both the poetic voice and the voice of the woman. The voice creeps into the text as a form of disruption. It distorts the logical structure of the sentence, substituting an insistent visual and phonic rhythm for grammatical sequence. The poet becomes an isolated “I,” deprived of its status as subject of a verb. Poetic language erodes the subject understood as a speaking being participating in the symbolic: “I” is “faltering forward,” stumbling in space and stuttering in words, hesitant in a language he does not inhabit anymore. The “I” has become an eye and an ear sensitive to displacement in language. The voice intrudes in the text with all the force of the “semiotic.” In Kristeva’s linguistic theory, the signifying process is composed of two modalities that function synchronically: the semiotic and the

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symbolic.47 The symbolic corresponds to grammar. It makes for the univocal signification of the text. The semiotic corresponds to the psychosomatic modality of the signifying process.48 It expresses an original libidinal multiplicity repressed in the symbolic. The semiotic disrupts the signifying process through elisions, repetitions, mere sound and the multiplication of meanings when images and metaphors explode the denotative function of language. Here the text is reduced to sound. A mere alliterative aggregate (“f,” “l,” “th”), the stanza seems to articulate a continuum: words have regressed to vocal modulations that express the most primitive oral drives, pain and suffering of the body. Reduced to mouth and a tongue, the subject and the text revert, through violation of the symbolic rules (elisions) and the pure jubilation of sound, to an instinctual moment of undecidability in language when what is actually said does not correspond to the meaning of the text. At the end it is not the ghost of the beloved woman, a particular object, which emerges, in a dialogue with “I,” but “the woman,” and a no longer coherent signifying subject dissolved into the primary continuity of the maternal body. Obliquely, poetic language regenerates prediscursive forces in language. The voice is what infiltrates language and transforms the well-organized system of the second stanza into the controlled chaos of the last one. The poetic function repairs the damage done by death. It revivifies language and gives a voice to the dead. Yet it maintains signification. It therefore corresponds to a compromise with the symbolic. All paths into, indeed valorizations of, pre-symbolic semiotic stases not only require the ensured maintenance of this signification but also serve signification, even as they dislocate it. No text, no matter how musicalized, is devoid of meaning or signification; on the contrary, musicalization pluralizes meanings.49

To the lighthouse of fiction Virginia Woolf, while working on To The Lighthouse, wrote in her diary: “I have an idea that I would invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel.” A new—by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?”50 To The Lighthouse clearly explores the elegiac nature of poetic language and dramatizes, in a self-referential manner, the relationship of the symbolic and the semiotic as it stages the creative crisis of a painter, Lily Briscoe, caught between the need to communicate in painting and the haunting memory of Mrs. Ramsay, the “multitudinous mother” in Ferrer’s

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phrase. She pervades and invades the canvass and yet can never be grasped and immobilized in paint.51 The text develops around the question of its own possibility, figured in Lily’s endlessly procrastinated painting. Stretching over ten years, both the plot of the novel and the realization of the painting around which the plot revolves, distribute their energy in three phases. In the first part, Mrs. Ramsay is the object of a linguistic quest. How can one render her truth and character in verbal or pictorial touches? Working out a grid in which to catch her, the text and the painting come to a halt in the central part in which, as in a dark hole, meaning and intention are swallowed into a chaos of signs. Ten years later, Lily takes her easel again and the quest for the lighthouse, the luminous halo that would be Mrs. Ramsay, is resumed. Already struggling with the deadening process of signification, which misses or desiccates its object, the artist must now cope with the actual death of the mother figure. Creation then becomes properly elegiac. But throughout, creation is equated to an Oedipal struggle between two conflicting forces. Lily, the spiritual daughter of Mrs. Ramsay must come to terms with the father figure, Mr. Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay corresponds to what Kristeva calls the symbolic modality of the signifying process. His “splendid mind” organizes the world in terms of the alphabet.52 He functions like a doxa, like syntax. His realm is that of positions and judgment. Here is how his son Andrew describes his work for Lily: “‘Think of a kitchen table then’, he told her, ‘when you are not there’” (23). The universe of Mrs. Ramsay, on the contrary, is diffuse and incommunicable. She stands for the dimension of depth in the flatness of the linguistic system. She opens up the impossible space of death and the Real in an upsurge of semiotic drives exploding the closed system of discourse. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are caught in a dialectical relationship in which they are mutually exclusive and yet inherently linked. Like discourse and figure or the symbolic and the semiotic, they only make sense together. In Chapter XI in Part 1 for instance, Mrs. Ramsay is alone. Her presence invades the text with more and more shadows, threatening to drag it into madness and dissolution until meaning is finally rescued by the arrival of Mr. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay is “a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others” (62). Alone and left to its own device, this principle of darkness leads to a form of textual death and suicide, as Mrs. Ramsay dissolves into rhythmic patterns and alliterative babble. “Expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated” (62), the wedge of darkness becomes the sea that swallows life: “it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep” (62). In an empathic move, Mrs. Ramsay, “losing

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personality,” becomes the stroke of the lighthouse that, like waves lapping along the beach, comes and goes in the night. But the text tries to resist, and as Mrs. Ramsay purses her lips as if not to give in to the poison of the waters of annihilation she is becoming, Mr. Ramsay crosses the line of vision. Order, knowledge and solidity are momentarily restored (64). Yet, when solitude returns, death and dissolution resurge, threatening to engulf Mrs. Ramsay, and, with her, the very possibility of the text. Like Mrs. Ramsay, the text “is trapped into saying something [it] did not mean” (63). Mrs. Ramsay gives up all intellectual control over her life and body and gives in to sheer ecstasy. She is literally beside herself, mad and other, unreachable. The text no longer obeys the usual rules of communication and discursive logic: signification is rapidly drowned in an endless meandering sentence (65) by a flood of light which is conveyed in preverbal semiology by tactile, olfactory, vocal and auditory images. The light is “stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain.” Its brightness touches all the senses, even smell, in “waves of pure lemon.” The vision rings in echoes as in “light” is “delight.” But again, Mr. Ramsay “turned and saw her,” saving her from imminent destruction and shattering. Mrs. Ramsay’s visionary ecstasy is not creative. It pushes the text to the limit of its possibility, as words do not seem able to carry the drives and the forces of the flood of light. But it does not create. Plunging into the wedge of darkness and returning to the inertia of primal rest and bliss do not make a painting. As she leaves, Mrs. Ramsay “takes the green shawl off the picture frame” (65), taking with her all signs of her presence in the work of art. Nothing has been grasped when everything was nearly lost. What the encounter with the core of darkness does is open up the possibility beyond the symbolic for what Virginia Woolf calls rhythm: Once you get that, you can’t use wrong words. But on the other hand here I am, sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes for, deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; . . . and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.53 Creation consists in making words to fit the wave of rhythm. There must be a balance between two contrary moments. In Mrs. Ramsay, the waves simply tumble in the exploded mind. The “wedge” of darkness requires

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a “hedge” to protect it from crashing and drowning. The wedge like the feminine world of water, woman, and eternal symbiotic rest needs a masculine grid, or frame (a hedge) in which to inscribe its effluence. Mr. Ramsay “looked into the hedge, its intricacy, its darkness” (64). Chapter XI in fact mimics the very process of creation while still withholding it on a thematic level. The interaction of the wedge and the hedge, woman and man, or the semiotic and the symbolic is figured in a vast chiasmus that embraces most of the encounter between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. “He felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her” (64) is echoed at the very end by “he wished, she knew to protect him” (65), while “he was sad” (64) is in direct connection with Mrs. Ramsay’s “beauty, her sadness” (65). At the core of the chiasmus, the ecstasy (“waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind. It is enough! It is enough!” (65)) is rewritten, controlled and mastered in signs. At the end, Mrs. Ramsay’s empathy is preserved but filtered: “he wished, she knew, to protect him.” Empathy is molded into the demands of the symbolic: “she knew.”

“So Much Depends, She Thought, Upon Distance”: Lily’s hallucination Only its inscription in the symbolic can liberate the poetic voice. In a similar fashion, in Chapter XI of Part 3, Lily reflects on the “razor edge of balance” (193), between the wedge and the hedge, which alone can produce the work of art. “Was it, she wondered, that the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees was too heavy?” (193). Was it the hedge? The artist must make her peace with the father and accept his laws of ordonnance. Lily must follow the line of the boat that takes Mr. Ramsay to the lighthouse. Yet, while accepting the rules of language, she must also distance herself from the world of vision and let go of Mrs. Ramsay. For it is there, at the core of her picture, that the wedge of darkness like a dark hole that threatens to swallow the white background, gapes like a wound.54 Following mentally the course of the boat on the sea allows Lily to do the work of mourning. On the boat, Mr. Ramsay, Cam and James learn solace and let go of the dead. No longer drowned in the sorrow occasioned by the death of Mrs. Ramsay, her husband opens up to the demands of the living: he praises James and protects Cam. James then accepts his father and sees the lighthouse not only as a symbol of his mother’s love but also as a stark reality. Mourning consists in resisting the temptation of chaos and the engulfment in the zone of darkness

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which threatens to spread everywhere from the center of the painting. Painting becomes elegiac monumentalization of the dead one. Lily paints to remember and remembers in painting: It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone over the sea. And, as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped into the past there. (172) “Tunnelling her way into the picture, into the past” (173), Lily reaches the melancholy crypt in her. She works through her relationship with the love object, in turn missed and hated, until the loss of the object becomes introjected and thus compensable in signs. Creation happens in a moment of hallucination in To The Lighthouse.55 Drowned in the past, the artist suddenly resurfaces and fuses memory and the present in an impossible temporality which in Ferrer’s phrase is “that of the unconscious.” Mrs. Ramsay is no longer the dead mother, a real being and a fantasmatic entity, a love object who would take her daughter in death with her or who refuses to let herself be framed in a picture. She becomes a pictorial force. Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there, quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat. (202) The hallucination, Ferrer explains, “does not correspond to any event that can be located in the present and is only attached to an indefinitely receding past.”56 Inscribed neither in the temporality of melancholy nor in that of triumphant reality, the hallucination opens up the space of creation in which there is neither a delineated object called Mrs. Ramsay nor a unitary subject of the painting. The hallucination marks the advent in discourse of what is beyond discourse. Suddenly in discourse, which Lily calls “the level of ordinary experience” (202), there can be “a miracle,” an “ecstasy.” “The underlying drives push their way across representational language and tend to emerge in the foreground through the sudden absence of the referent.”57 The semiotic, pushing through the symbolic and opening up the space of art apart from reality and the unreal, is clearly heard and seen in the following phrase: “Some wave of white went over the window pane.” The windowpane has replaced

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the pain of remembering. It is the window of representation, and yet it does not pretend to be a mirror of reality. “Wave of white,” of course, condenses and displaces the mother who is both milk or nourishment and the immensity of the sea where one can rest and be drowned. Waves of white become organized in a rhythm, both graphic and alliterative, which again and again inscribes the wave in a series of “v” and “w.” The semi vowel “w,” in Ferrer’s expression, is “perhaps the bearer of an oral sucking instinct.” It certainly sums up the world of the mother, the feminine and the woman. It is where a subject, Virginia Woolf, finds and loses herself in language, refracted against an object no longer separate from it. Lily has become an artist, capable of articulating the primary inscription of loss semiotically. Is art then a source of contestation and revolution as it disturbs the system with traces of repressed subterranean impulses, or is art a compromise in which the symbolic ultimately triumphs? “Articulate, paternal language, which by its very nature, represses the essential part of reality . . . is subtly contested, diverted from its usage, forced to let glimmer through what it normally keeps quiet, what by nature it can only cover,” Ferrer concludes.58 But “because that instinctual heterogeneity must be re-presented in and through the paternal law, it . . . must remain within the most fragile regions of the Symbolic.”59 Subversion emerges from beneath the surface of culture only to return there. It is a temporary move, which finally submits to what it contests. Symptomatically, the last page of To The Lighthouse gives us the image of a very tame artist, whose ultimate gesture is one of compromise: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clearly for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre” (209). The line is the epitome of the triumph of the symbolic that controls and reduces the gaping hole in the center of the picture. An ominous image in fact suggests that the “razor edge of balance” between semiotic and symbolic forces in the signifying process is not so much a compromise as a subtle form of domination on the part of institutionalized language. The artist must “hold the scene—so—in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it” (201). The chiasmus drawn in Chapter XI, Part 1 (64–5) has become a pair of jaws, a controlling device. In To The Lighthouse, the semiotic, glimmering through the grid of organized conventional language remains subservient to the system. It allows for a moment the raising of the dead, but only so as to soothe the living, who can find their place in culture and continue to live.

Notes Introduction 1. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), 140. 2. Greenblatt argues that “purgatory facilitated lengthy and ongoing relations between the living and the dead,” and enabled the bereaved “to work through, with less psychological distress than they otherwise might experience, their feelings of abandonment and anger at the dead” (Steven Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 103). The resurgence of the figure of the ghost as the sign of impossible mourning rather than superstitious belief might in fact be seen as an effect of the protestant critique and dismantling of the Catholic notion of purgatory. 3. See Freud’s analysis: “Robbers, burglars and ghosts, of whom some people feel frightened before going to bed, and who sometimes pursue their victims after they are asleep, all originate from one and the same class of infantile reminiscence. They are the nocturnal visitors who rouse children and take them up to prevent their wetting the bed, or lift the bedclothes to make sure where they have put their hands in their sleep. Analyses of some of these anxiety dreams have made it possible for me to identify these nocturnal visitors more precisely. In every case, the robbers stood for the sleeper’s father whereas the ghosts corresponded to female figures in white nightgowns.” In S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 439. 4. P. Buse and A. Stott, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 3. 5. Jacques Rancière, La parole muette (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1998), 10. 6. Buse and Stott, 1998, 9. 7. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, the Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981), 95. 8. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 141. 9. Michelle Massé, “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Companions to Literature, 2000), 235. 10. See for instance Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Nicholas Royle’s work, in particular The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 11. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Literature and Psychoanalysis, Intertextual Readings, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 127. 12. Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge 1994), 85. In that book, Derrida claims that deconstruction “would be 156

Notes

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

157

impossible and unthinkable in a pre-Marxist space” (92), and that deconstruction, being “the attempted radicalization of Marxism” (92) has to be seen in terms of ghostly inheritance. Derrida, 1994, 176. Royle, 2003, 5. Wolfreys, 2002, 3. Castricano, 2002, 104. In Cryptomimesis, Castricano analyzes Derrida’s theories of writing, in relation with the Gothic, in terms of issues of descent and inheritance, but also in terms of a “paradoxical topography of inside outside” (102) and of crypt effects. Multiple displacements in language create a sense of undecidability of one’s position, which is crucial to the reading and the writing of the text. She demonstrates how Derrida’s writing constantly avoids “linearization,” and how cryptomimesis, because it plays the undecidability of possible positions, maintains the open endedness of language. Colin Davis, “Hauntology Spectres and Phantoms,” French Studies, 2005, 59 (3). Colin Davis, 2005, 373. Royle, 2003, 280. Royle, 2003, 280. See Chapter 1 for an analysis of Laplanche in correlation with Abraham and Torok, Chapter 2 for a study of Lyotard’s figural and Lacan’s real in terms of haunting, and Chapter 3 for a reading of The Monk with Abraham and Kristeva. Like Marie-Ange Depierre, Paroles Fantomatiques et cryptes textuelles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1993, 28–9), I recognize the danger inherent in applying Abraham and Torok’s methodology too systematically to literature. The uncovering of hidden words (or cryptonyms) behind the words of literary texts might well reveal a phantom in the literary critic rather than in the text. The text then is a mere pretext for the expression of the secret agenda of the critic. The method can lead to an alteration of the text scrutinized. Distortions of the words to fit the subjective interpretation of the literary critic playing doctor with the text and making it speak in foreign tongues could be infinite. In Gothic Hauntings, I use Abraham and Torok in correlation with other theoretical work to raise issues rather than bring answers and to demonstrate how the narrative secrets, the crypts and the phantoms of the Gothic are in fact symptoms of a more general questioning of the symbolic and of the process of symbolization. The original in French for “unthought” is “un impensé.” Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 84. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanton: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 97.

1 Transgenerational Haunting: The Subject as Other 1. “What you have inherited from your fathers, you must earn so as to possess it.” 2. In Transmission de la vie psychique entre générations (Paris: Dunod, 1993), René Kaës gives an historical account of the research on psychic inheritance and

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes transmission from Freud to Abraham and Torok in the 1970s to the contemporary work of Haidée Faimberg. See in particular John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (eds.), Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation and the Drives (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992) and Nicolas Abraham, Anasémies II: L’écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, collec. La philosophie en effet, 1978). See Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo” (1913), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by J. Stachey, volume XIII (1913–14), (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). Leslie Fiedler, 1960, 135. Jenny Bourne Taylor, “Nobody’s Secret: Illegitimate Inheritance and the Uncertainties of Memory,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 21 (2000): 569. On the link between castle, inheritance and the Gothic, see R. ParkinGounelas, 2001, 121. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; reprint 1982), 5. All references to this work will be from this edition and inserted between brackets in the text. Walpole’s Gothic “moral” is in fact an illustration of Exodus 20.5: “I am a jealous God, visiting the inequities of the father upon the children.” Helene Moglen, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of The English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 119. See The Castle of Otranto, ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–xiii. The emphasis is mine. I am borrowing Punter’s pun on the nature of the Gothic as para-site from his introduction to Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 3. Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 52. Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 97. Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 89. Helene Moglen uses Abraham and Torok’s theories on melancholy to show that the story of Theodore echoes Walpole’s life and his conflictual feelings for his father who rejected him as an illegitimate child and his undying desire for a mother he could never mourn. Moglen reads The Castle of Otranto together with Walpole’s failed tragedy The Mysterious Mother to identify a rich drama of irreparable loss, not so much within the texts or within writing as within their author who is being analyzed via his literary production. Walpole is seen as a melancholy cryptophore who carries the secret of his mother, the loss of whom he cannot introject. Moglen’s method and goal are therefore different from mine. My concern is with texts as entities that are distinct from their authors, and the way they can be read symptomatically as expressing the plight of all language haunted by the traces of incommunicable messages. Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” translated by Nicholas Rand, Critical Inquiry, 13.2 (1987): 289. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: ‘The Lost Object—Me,’” translated by Nicholas Rand, SubStance, 12 (1984): 17, n.1. See Abraham, Diacritics, 18.4 (Winter 1988): 2–30.

Notes

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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In French, see Abraham, Anasémies II: L’écorce et le noyau (Paris: AubierFlammarion, collec. La philosophie en effet, 1978), 447–69. See Punter, 1980, 52. Abraham, Diacritics, 18. 4 (Winter 1988): 2. Nicholas Rand, “Family Romance or Family History? Psychoanalysis and Dramatic Invention in Nicolas Abraham’s ‘The Phantom of Hamlet,’” Diacritics, 18.4 (Winter 1988): 28. Abraham, 1978, 414. Abraham, 1978, 414. Abraham, 1978, 416. Abraham, 1978, 418. Abraham, 1978, 422. Abraham, 1978, 422. Abraham, 1978, 423. Villiers de l’Isle Adam, L’intersigne in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, NRF, Gallimard, 1986), 694–709. The page numbers in between brackets in the text refer to this edition. The tale has been translated into English. See Robert Baldick (ed.), Cruel Tales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963), 182–200. The translations given in the text are from that edition. Laplanche, in Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation and the Drive, eds. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 33. Fletcher and Stanton, 1992, 23. In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Laplanche gives the following definition: “I am using the term primal seduction to describe a fundamental situation in which an adult proffers to a child verbal, non-verbal and even behavioral signifiers which are pregnant with unconscious sexual signification,” 126. Laplanche, 1989, 22. Laplanche quoted by Fletcher, in Fletcher and Stanton, 1982, 110–11. Fletcher and Stanton, 1992, 111. Abraham, 1978, 422. Michael Davis, “Gothic’s Enigmatic Signifier: The Case of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla,’” Gothic Studies, 6, 2 (Nov 2004): 232. Michael Davis, 2004, 234. Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 64–81. Rashkin’s study of narrative has been very influential in promoting Abraham and Torok’s clinical writing and exploring its potential for literary studies and textual analysis. Rashkin is concerned with uncovering textual secrets and exorcizing the “haunting effects of family secrets” (3) within narratives, via close readings that pay attention to distortions, polysemic ambiguities and other jarring elements in a text. Castricano reproaches Rashkin with limiting her concept of “text” to “the book and to so-called fiction” and thus “repressing the notion that textuality extends to culture, ideology, the family, and even the so-called subject” (142). Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative indeed works on specific texts of a specific literary tradition from Poe to Conrad, and seems to suggest that some texts only are haunted by phantoms transmitted across generations. But I believe that Rashkin’s rigorous approach to Fantastic texts can have

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40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

Notes an impact on textuality in general because it demonstrates the principle of mobility of the signifying chain and relies on the idea that there are no stable meanings. These principles apply to culture, ideology and the subject, and go beyond the scope of narrative analysis. Rashkin, 1992, 79. Rashkin, 1992, 78. On cryptonymy, see Chapter 4 where Abraham’s concept is fully explored. The Castle of Otranto, 1982, 39. Laplanche, 1989, 103. Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 12, quoted by Wolfrey). For Wolfrey, the “multi-voiced-ness” of the Gothic is the sign that it is a “haunted medium”: “There are always other voices, other disembodied, ghostly articulations within and against the dream of full, simple, self-evident speech to be read in any apparently stable voice, such as that desired in and for realist narrative” (13). The Gothic subject is “spectralized,” “never singular,” and his voice therefore is plural. Ross Chambers, “Changing Coats: Villiers’ ‘L’Intersigne’ and the Authority of Fiction,” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. xxviii, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 63–77. Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, “L’inconscient. Une étude psychanalytique,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 183 (juillet 1961): 81–129. For a translation into English, see J. Laplanche and S. Leclaire, “The Unconscious: a Psychoanalytic Study,” Yale French Studies, 48 (1972). See Laplanche and Leclaire, 1961, 123.

2 Discourse and Its Other: The Figural and the Real 1. This is an entry of the Collins Dictionary of English language (London: Collins, 1979), 1233. 2. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, October Books (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 23. 3. Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October, 58 (1991): 15. 4. Žižek, 1991, 23. 5. Žižek, 1991, 19. 6. Žižek, 1991, 19. 7. Dolar, 1991, 14. 8. Dolar, 1991, 20. 9. Clément Rosset, Le Réel, traité de l’idiotie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1997/2004), 43. The translations for this text are mine. 10. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), 6. 11. Violence of Language, 5. 12. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson, 1985). 13. Lecercle, 1990, 37. 14. Jean-Claude Milner, Les noms indistincts (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), 40. The translation is mine. The French text goes as follows: “Le symptôme le plus immédiat en est un impossible: si multipliés que soient les dits, littéralement

Notes

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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excentriques à ce qui en eux, se représente ou se distingue, toujours y demeure quelque chose qui ne se dit pas. Les mots manquent dira-t-on, pointant ainsi le symptôme du réel sous les espèces du défaut. Mais il convient immédiatement d’ajouter que quelque chose aussi se dit toujours en plus, qui n’était pas demandé—dont il était demandé qu’on ne le dît pas.” Milner, L’amour de la langue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), 80. Serge Leclaire, “Fragments de la langue d’avant Babel,” in Du Secret, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 14 (Automne 1976): 207–15. Leclaire, 1976, 213. Gilles Deleuze, “The Schizo and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis, eds. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia UP, 1983), 324–39. Deleuze, 1983, 330. Deleuze, 1983, 328. Deleuze, 1983, 328. Deleuze, 1983, 331. Deleuze, 1983, n.12, 339. Deleuze, 1983, 333. See Lecercle (1990) for a close analysis of Wolfson’s linguistic system: “False Synthesis, or Wolfsonizing language,” 85–95. Perceval, Perceval’s Narrative, A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis, 1830–1832, ed. Gregory Bateson (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1974). See Lecercle (1990, 230–4). Perceval, 1974, 274–5. Perceval, 1974, 33. Perceval, 1974, 35. Perceval, 1974, 116. Artaud, Révolution Surréaliste, 3, 1925, quoted by Lecercle in Philosophy through the Looking-Glass, 44. Deleuze, 1983, 328. Jean Bellemin-Noël, “Des formes fantastiques aux thèmes fantasmatiques,” Littérature, 2 (Mai 1971): 69. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1971). References to this book will be given directly in the text. Lyotard, 1971, 9. Lyotard defines difference as a primary process and a principle of chaos and not as an interval separating two terms in the same order. See Lyotard (1971, 135–60) and Daniel Charles, “Chair et Lyse,” in Lyotard, L’ARC 64, (1976), 60–6. See also Hubert Damisch, “Dynamique libidinale” in Lyotard, L’ARC 64, (1976), 53–60. Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard, Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), 36. Readings, 1991, xxxi. See Lyotard, 1971, 376–8. Michel Collot, La poésie moderne et la structure d’horizon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 249. Lyotard, 1971, 144. Malcolm Lowry, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (New York: The American Library, 1968), quoted by O. Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire, ou l’Autre Scène (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 104.

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Notes

43. Lyotard, 1971, 17. 44. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard, 1945), 272–3. 45. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, quoted by G. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988), 80. 46. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration, Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), 127. In “Daydreaming and Creative Writers,” Freud similarly shows that the recognition of fantasmatic constructions in the work of art is the source of pleasure. 47. Garret Stewart, Reading Voices, Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 48. Stewart, 1990, 32. 49. Stewart, 1990, 5. 50. Stewart, 1990, 32. 51. Stewart, 1990, 3. 52. Stewart, 1990, 5. 53. Louis Marin, “The I as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendhal’s Life of Henry Brulard,” October (MIT Press, Summer 1979): 65–79. This essay appeared in a different form in French in La voix excommuniée (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981), 29–118. 54. Marin, 1979, 68. 55. Marin, 1979, 75. 56. Marin, 1979, 76. 57. Quoted by Stewart, 1990, 297. 58. Yves Bonnefoy, Entretiens sur la poésie (1972–1990) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1990). 59. The emphasis is mine.

3 Gothic as Poetics 1. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way,Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, (New York, 1982), 9–11. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Stuctural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975), 44. The original in French is Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, coll. Points, 1970) 3. Jackson, 1981, 3. 4. Todorov’s remarkable study offers the first rigorous definition of the fantastic. In order to belong to the genre of the fantastic, a text must fulfill three conditions: it must force the reader to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural world. Hesitation is the true marker of the genre. As soon as the hesitation subsides, the text can be classified as either marvelous or uncanny. Such a hesitation, that is the second condition, might or might not be shared by a character in the story. Finally, the reader must reject allegorical as well as poetic interpretations of the text. The fantastic elicits a certain response from its reader, a poise and indecision. The fantastic is in the eye of the reader. It is a certain way of receiving and processing the message in a communication situation. Yet, this purely theoretical model seems, according to Todorov, to correspond to an historical situation. The examples of

Notes

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

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the “pure” fantastic Todorov comes up with are exclusively chosen among a few nineteenth-century texts. The fantastic then is a genre that dominates a moment of literary production. It appears as a strong form in the nineteenth century because, Todorov explains, it is nothing but the bad conscience of the positivist era (168). Defined as a genre, and as a genre in opposition to the dominant cultural forms of our era, the fantastic is deprived of its real subversive edge. It still has a place in the system and does not escape the structure of understanding in which it occurs. In the wake of Rosemary Jackson, I define the Gothic as a literary form in which the fantastic mode is enacted. But Jackson’s delineation of the fantastic as a mode that runs counter to realism and is composed of “a series of structural elements underlying works in different periods of time” (6) remains confusing. Although she recognizes the transgeneric dimension of the fantastic, she seems nevertheless to limit it to being “the underside of realism,” the “other” of realism, a mere inversion of the structures characteristic of realistic modes, but still, a mode that is structurally definable. Like Todorov’s conception, Jackson’s approach based on oppositional terms seems to limit the fantastic: it is a mode of contestation within the established literary system rather than a total subversion of the system. Nicholas Royle offers a comprehensive reconsideration of Todorov’s theory through a redefinition of the Uncanny. For Royle, the uncanny and the fantastic share a common experience of “hesitation and uncertainty” (The Uncanny, 19) and therefore should not necessarily be seen as separate, and should not be limited to the category of genre or non-genre. Royle’s characterization of the uncanny as a “trembling of what is natural,” “an involuntary querying, the experience of a hesitation and suspension concerning the very nature of the explicable” (30) clearly shows that “it makes genre ‘blink’” (19). Bill Readings, 1991, XXXI. Katherine Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis (New York and London: Methuen 1984), xii. The fantastic “impulse” functions like an uncanny: it “overflows the institution of literature. It inhabits, it haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary,” to quote Royle’s formulas (19). Punter, The Literature of Terror, A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present day (London: Longman, 1980), 404. Robert Miles, in Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993), argues that the Gothic is successful as a subversive form because of its very failure to tidy things up neatly and coherently. The Law, the social and symbolic law are thus constantly questioned (83). Terry Castle, “The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in The New Eighteenth Century, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York, London: Methuen, 1987). Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn 1988): 26–62. Castle writes: “by the end of the nineteenth century, ghosts had disappeared from everyday life, but as the poets intimated, human experience had become more ghost-ridden than ever. Through a strange process of rhetorical displacement, thought itself had become phantasmagorical” (31).

164

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13. Castle, 1988, 29. 14. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 127, quoted by Castle, 1987, 238. 15. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal, Studies in Narrative Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 71. 16. Brooke-Rose, 1981, 71. 17. See Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970). 18. Jackson, 1981, 62. 19. Jean Bellemin-Noël, “Des formes fantastiques aux thèmes fantasmatiques,” Littérature, 2 (Mai 1971): 112. See the analysis of Gautier’s text, “Onuphrius,” in chapter 2 above. 20. Dolar, 1991, 7. 21. Of the novel of terror, Radcliffe says that it “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life.” The novel of horror on the contrary “contracts and freezes and nearly annihilates them.” Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 16 (1826), quoted by Anne Williams, 1995, 73. 22. See Kate Ferguson Ellis, who, in The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) defines the Gothic as “a discourse about the home, about women’s inscription into that space and men’s relationship to the home thus defined” (218) and Eugenia DeLamotte, in Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 23. Ellis, 1989, xiii. 24. See Williams, 1995, 99–107. According to Williams, dramatic irony, multiple points of view, a tragic plot and the supernatural accepted as reality are the conventions of male Gothic. In female Gothic on the contrary, the limited point of view of the heroine generates suspense, the supernatural is always explained, and a happy ending necessary. 25. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams in The Standard Edition, vol. 3, 219. 26. See Edward Saïd, Beginnings, Intention and Method (New York: Columbia, UP, 1985), 162–3. 27. Bradford Mudge, “‘The Man with Two Brains’: Gothic Novels, Popular Culture, Literary History,” PMLA 107, no. 1 (January 1992): 84. 28. Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk (1796) (reprint New York:Grove Press, 1952). 29. Radcliffe, 1794, 672. 30. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (1797) (reprint, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968), 414. 31. Radcliffe, 1794, 670. 32. Radcliffe, 1794, 670. 33. Williams, 1995, 44. 34. Williams, 1995, 44. 35. Mark Madoff, “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, vol. 8 (1979): 347. Madoff shows how the concept of the immemorial encouraged the fabrication of myths about the past. Gothic never applied to an actual historical time, but corresponds to the idea of “another time,” beyond memory, where things were radically different. In the seventeenth century, parliamentary leaders used the term Gothic to defend their prerogatives against the sovereign. The Gothic then referred to pseudo-history, to an “ancient constitution” drawn up by enlightened ancestors. Historical vagueness becomes a political weapon. Walpole’s or Reeve’s

Notes

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

165

passion for the Gothic immemorial past of the nation clearly derives from the same disbelief in the present and betrays the same political agenda as in the mouth of a seventeenth-century Tory. Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London, New York: Routledge, 1995), 32. Victor Smirnoff, “Le squelette dans le placard,” Du secret, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, no. 14 (automne 1976): 42. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) (reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1974), 529. Radcliffe, 1794, 5. Laurent Jenny, “Structure et fonctions du cliché: A propos des ‘Impressions d’Afrique,’” Poétique, 12 (1972): 498. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, vol. 96, no. 2 (1981): 264. See Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1988) on the issue of how the Gothic’s attack on Catholicism reveals a nostalgia for the mother church, but more fundamentally a distrust of its own impulses. Quoted by Vijay Mishra in The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 6. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein in The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York, Oxford: Oxford, UP, 1990), 167–71. See Chapter 4. See my article, “Insémination et dissémination: Frankenstein ou l’imaginaire au féminin,” XVII–XVIII, Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, no. 37 (Novembre 1993): 103–18. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778) (reprint, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967). Williams, 1995, 66. Mishra, 1994, 54. Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, ed. Montague Summers (London: Houghton Mifflin Company and Constable and Company Limited, 1925). Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). Sedgwick, 1981, 260. Walpole, 1925, 258. Walpole, 1925, 261. Williams, 1995, 67. Lewis, 1952, 166. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 41. Barthes, 1970, 41. David Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History, 16 (1984–5), 302. Nancy Caplan Mellerski, “The Exploding Matrix: The Episode of the Bleeding Nun in M. G. Lewis’s Monk,” in Forms of the Fantastic, Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, eds. Jane Hokenson and Howard Pearce (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 41. Mellerski, 1986, 41. The Monk is a perfect example of the cryptic game displayed in the Gothic: Jonathan Pollock (Le Moine (de Lewis) d’Antonin Artaud (Paris: Folio, Foliothèque, 2002), 17) analyzes how the family name, “Cisternas,” from the latin “Cista”

166

63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

Notes (casket) and the Greek “Kistè” (box) also evokes the French word “ciste” (a funerary construction ) and paronomastically the English word “sister.” Agnes and Antonia, the sisters of Lorenzo and Ambrosio, are thus phantomatically condemned to be entombed. They are the victims of a program that has never been voiced out or integrated in their psychic system until the “other sister,” the Bleeding Nun who was never granted any form of sepulture is finally laid to rest by Raymond. Etymology and homophony are forms of linguistic haunting as past meanings return in the present of the word or sound returns like a murmur in the silence of the written signs. In the Gothic, language is opened to melancholy as the place that harbors the things that refuse to die completely. Mellerski, 1986, 47. Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” EHL, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1973), 258. Brooks, 1973, 258. Brooks, 1973, 256. In an interpretation of the text as haunted writing, Raymond and Agnes’ love would be seen as the product of the Bleeding Nun, haunting them from the unburied past of a family secret as much as she is the product of their lust. The narrative of Ambrosio’s sexual gratification is interrupted precisely at its apex, when Ambrosio in the heat of passion and excitement, cradled in Matilda’s arms exclaims: “Thine, ever thine” (109), to be resumed after a protracted ellipsis (corresponding to Raymond’s narrative of the story of the Bleeding Nun), 226: “He drew himself from Matilda’s arms.” The text, literally brackets Beatrice’s story within the arms of Matilda, mimicking impossible jouissance and establishing a link between Ambrosio’s impossible desire and the Bleeding Nun. Dolar, 1991, 10. Morris, (1984–5), 302. Hélène Cixous, “La fiction et ses fantômes: Une lecture de l’Unheimliche de Freud,” Poétique, 10 (1972): 214. John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), 163. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 163. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” On Creativity and the Unconscious, Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, selected and introduced by Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 152. Cixous, 1972, 214. Kristeva, 1982, 71. Kristeva, 1982, 4. Lechte, 1990, 160. Kristeva, 1982, 4. Freud, 1958, 152. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), 3.

4 The Melancholy Crypt of Frankenstein This chapter in its original version was published as “Family Secrets and a Shameful Disease: ‘Aberrrations of Mourning’ in Frankenstein,” QWERTY 3, 1993, 53–61.

Notes

167

1. James Landau, “A Vindication of the Rights of the Dead: Mary Wollstonecraft, Alchemy and the Crypt of Frankenstein,” eSharp, 3, 2004. 2. Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet,” quoted in Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 144. 3. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, translated by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 4. Abraham and Torok, 1986, 79. 5. Abraham, 1978, 95. 6. Esther Rashkin, Diacritics, “Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Work of Abraham and Torok”, 18.4 (1988): 40. 7. Frankenstein is quoted from The Mary Shelley Reader which reprints the 1818 edition and also gives the 1831 Introduction. Betty Bennett and Charles Robinson (eds.), The Mary Shelley Reader (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1990). The novel was first published with a preface by Mary Shelley’s husband while the 1831 edition is introduced by a text in Mary’s own hand. 8. Derrida, “Foreword”, xii, in Abraham and Torok, 1986. 9. Esther Rashkin, 1992, 175. 10. Nicholas Rand, 1994, Introduction, 7. 11. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Frankenstein, Mythe et Philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1988), 83. 12. See for instance Lecercle’s suggestions for parodic Oedipal scenarios; Little Victor is in love with his mommy but fears his daddy’s reaction. When mommy dies, he has only two solutions: either he sublimates and studies hard to become a scientist or he represses his guilt, which comes back in the hallucinatory form of a castrating father, or a big monster. See also Paul Sherwin in “Creation as Catastrophe,” in Mary Shelley, Modern Critical Views, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 140: “at once feces and phallus, the filth is also the maternal presence he is assembling from phantasmal body parts and buried wishes. In short Frankenstein’s descent is a grotesque act of lovemaking, the son stealing into the womb that bore him in order to implant his seed.” 13. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Introjection-Incorporation, Mourning or Melancholia,” in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlocher (New York: International University Press, 1980), 8. 14. See Laurence Rickels’ very suggestive reading in Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), 17. 15. Abraham and Torok, 1980, 6. 16. Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley, Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1989), 63. 17. Mellor, 1989, 121. 18. Rickels, 1988, 7. 19. Abraham and Torok, 1980, 6. 20. See David Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together; Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth Century English Novel (London: Methuen, 1987), 70: “The Monster discovers that it has been old before it was young, dead before it has been alive, worm-ridden before it has been fashioned.” 21. The word “mummy” for mother, appears during the nineteenth century in British English. 22. Derrida, “Foreword”, xiv, in Abraham and Torok, 1986.

168 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

Notes Derrida, “Foreword”, xiv, in Abraham and Torok, 1986. Derrida, “Foreword”, xiii, in Abraham and Torok, 1986. Mellor, 1989, 104. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 238–9. See Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris: Dunod, 1995). Abraham and Torok, “The Shell and the Kernel,” Diacritics, 9 (1979): 25. See chapter 1 for a complete account of the notion of crypt in Abraham and Torok. Peggy Kamuf, “Abraham’s Wake,” Diacritics, 9 (1979): 38. Kamuf, 1979, 38. Abraham and Torok, 1980, 8. On Perceval’s Narrative and Le schizo et les langues, see chapter 1. Italics are mine. Ronell, 1989, 195. On Beaufort’s disgrace and its social and political implications, see Kate Ferguson Ellis, 1989, 188–9. John Hillis Miller, “Thomas Hardy, Jacques Derrida, and the Dislocation of Souls,” in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, eds. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 137. Mellor, 1989, 54.

5 Secretions and Secretaries: The Secret of Dracula Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) (reprint, Penguin Books, 1979). All the references to the novel are from this edition and directly noted in the text. A shorter version of this chapter was published in Mémoires perdues, mémoires vives, eds. Marie-Christine Lemardeley, Carle Bonafous-Murat and André Topia (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2006), 31–45. 1. Quoted by Nathalie Saudo, “ ‘She wants Blood’ Discours sanguin et dégénerescence dans Dracula,” in Dracula, Lecture d’une oeuvre, eds. Claire Bazin and Serge Chauvin, (Paris: editions du temps, 2005), 50. 2. In Gothic Pathologies, 2. Punter defines the law as “the mass specific to a particular society, of the supposed unhaunted textual materials which it knows. In other words, the law is the imposition of certainty, the rhetorical summation of the absence or the loss, of doubt.” The vampire as the figure of the other has been the focus of most critical approaches in the last decades. The vampire is the New Woman, the homosexual, the dark foreigner other of imperialist fears etc. . . . All these metaphorical interpretations are indirectly included in the idea that the vampire is what resists and haunts the system, the Law, that is, the symbolic. 3. Leclaire proposes an image that encapsulates very well the nature of any secret where containment and revelation are offered in one and a single movement: the secret is “like closed lips barred by an index finger” (A Child is Being Killed, 53). 4. Dagonet, Henri. “Towards a Biopsychiatry” in Incorporations, Zone 6 (1993), 518. 5. Kittler, Discourse Network, 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 196.

Notes

169

6. David Wellbery, Foreword to Kittler’s Discourse Network, 1800/1900, xiii. 7. See the reference to Rancière in the introductory chapter. 8. Michel Butor, Eloge de la machine à écrire (Paris: Répertoire IV, 1974), 425, quoted by Robert Olorenshaw, “Narrating the Monster: From Mary Shelley to Bram Stoker,” in Frankenstein Creation and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bahn (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 175. 9. Olorenshaw, 1994, 175. 10. Heidegger, quoted by Ronell, 1989, 198. 11. Wellbery, 1990, xiv. 12. Wellbery, 1990, xiv. 13. Wellbery, 1990, xxx. 14. Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” EHL 59 (1992): 471. 15. Wicke, 1992, 467. 16. Kittler, 1990, 195. 17. Kittler, 1990, 195. 18. Kittler, 1990, 195. 19. In Frankenstein, Victor gradually becomes unable to tell his own story and Walton can no longer sign his own letters, as if the trace on the paper and the hand were no longer linked. This also clearly appears in the fact that Victor refuses to recognize the fingerprints of the monster on his victims’ necks as his own. As for the monster, by strangling his victims, he attacks their voice, tries to extinguish their faculty of speech precisely because voice is the hiding place of subjectivity in language. Frankenstein is subjectivity in crisis. In Dracula, signs, letters and prints are no longer linked to a subject. They therefore are at the service of an objective universe. 20. Kittler, 1990, 294. 21. Flechsig, a professor of psychiatry at the university of Liepzig at the dawn of the twentieth century, quoted by Kittler, 1990, 295. 22. Rickels, 1988, 53–4. 23. Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media,” EHL, 59 (1992): 473. 24. Wicke, 1992, 474. 25. Olorenshaw, 1994, 173. 26. Kittler, 1990, 225. 27. See Bram Stoker, “The Dream in the Dead House,” in Midnight Tales, ed. and intro. Peter Haining (London: Peter Owen, 1990), 17–29. This discarded section was first published posthumously by Stoker’s widow and will therefore not be directly part of my analysis of Dracula. I am mentioning it to illustrate the way the Gothic thrives on quotations and how gothic texts incorporate other gothic texts. Haunting pervades all levels of the Gothic text, pushing the temporal limits of narrative to include other messages, other stories but also precursor texts. 28. Stoker, 1990, 24. 29. See Dracula, 1979, 372. 30. Rebeca Pope, “Writing and Biting in Dracula,” LIT, vol. 1, no. 3 (1990): 209. 31. Quoted by Kittler, 1990, 91. 32. Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8 (Fall 1984): 119.

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33. Kittler, 1990, 195. 34. The QWERTY keyboard was not the only keyboard used in 1898. Kittler reminds us that the idea of the QWERTY keyboard as a universal keyboard emerged only around 1880, in Toronto. The mass production of typewriters dates back to that moment when a universal keyboard was agreed on. But in 1898 when Dracula was written, some late Victorian ABCDEF keyboards were still in circulation. Stoker might have owned a typewriter but also almost certainly had his text typed by a professional, so his knowledge of the QWERTY keyboard cannot be ascertained. As for the type of keyboard on Mina’s Traveler’s Typewriter, it is not mentioned in the text. My argument here engages with the idea that Dracula uses the typewriter and in particular the keyboard as a fantasy object. It is not intended as a dactylographic demonstration. I am very grateful to Ms. Fuller (Librarian, Rosenbach Museum and Library) for having pointed out to me that a number of typing mistakes in the typescript of Dracula, words left blank and subsequently filled by hand or indeed mis-transcriptions suggest that the typist of Dracula was not familiar with the content of the text. One of the recurring errors according to Ms. Fuller is the mis-recognition of the name “Count Dracula.” The fantasmatic and phantomatic possibilities of the misreadings and typos of the name Dracula is what I am interested in here. 35. On the issue of unconscious cerebration, see David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); John Greenway, “‘Unconscious Cerebration’ and the Happy Ending of Dracula,” Journal of Dracula Studies, no. 4 (2002): 2–8; William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (New York: Saint Martins Press, 2002); and Fred Botting “The Gothic Production of the Unconscious,” in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, eds. Glennis Byron and David Punter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). As Greenway for instance reminds us, Seward borrows the idea of “unconscious cerebration” from Dr. William Carpenter whose research tried to establish relationships between mind and body and to account in particular for unconscious mental reflexes (Greenway, 2). 36. Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Dracula (New York: Clarkson N. Potter Inc., 1975), 26. 37. This is of course the position defended by Abraham and Torok. See Abraham and Torok, 1986. 38. Alan Johnson, “Bent and Broken Necks: Signs of Design in Stoker’s Dracula,” The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbour, Michigan: UIM Research Press, 1988), 231–47. 39. Johnson, 1988, 239. 40. The process described in Dracula is very close to what I analyzed in The Castle of Otranto in Chapter 1 as the key Gothic scene of haunting: a scene of “transgenerational transmission” in which a phantom, an unknown and unknowable secret is transmitted from person to person without having been stated. 41. Abraham and Torok, “A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: ‘The Lost Object—Me,’” SubStance, no. 43 (1984): n.1, 17. 42. Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” Critical Inquiry, 13, no. 2 (1987): 290–1. 43. Terry Castle, 1988, 31.

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171

44. Craft, 1984, 109. 45. Craft, 1984, 129. 46. Carol Senf, Vampires in Nineteenth Century English Literature (OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1988), 62. 47. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 123. 48. J. G. Ballard, “Project for a Glossary of the 20th Century” in Incorporations, ed. J. Crary and S. Kwinter (New York: Zone, vol. 6), 277.

6 The Raising of the Dead: Art and Melancholy 1. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 60. 2. Jocelyn Moorhouse, dir. Proof, with Hugo Weaving. House and Moorhouse Films, Melbourne, Australia, 1991. 3. Nadar, “My Life as a Photographer,” in October: The First Decade 1976–1986, eds. A. Michelson, R. Kraus, D. Crimp and J. Copjec (Boston: MIT Press, 1987), 18. See also Balzac in “Le Cousin Pons”, Chapter XXXII in La Comédie Humaine, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1977, V.7, 584–5. 4. Nadar, 1987, 18. 5. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 369. 6. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990), 15. 7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: The Noon Day Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 21. 8. Barthes, 1981, 15. 9. Barthes, 1981, 5. 10. Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” in October: The First Decade 1976–1986, eds. A. Michelson, R. Kraus, D. Crimp and J. Copjec (Boston: MIT Press, 1987), 39–58. 11. Didi Huberman, 1987, 41. 12. Barthes, 1981, 79. 13. Didi-Huberman, 1987, 44. 14. Barthes, 1981, 80. 15. Barthes, 1981, 14. 16. Barthes, 1981, 53. 17. On Barthes’ analysis of the Van der Zee picture and the punctum as fantasy, see Victor Burgin, “Diderot, Barthes, Vertigo,” in Formations of Fantasy, eds. V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (London, New York: Methuen, 1986), 92. 18. Barthes, 1981, 59. 19. Barthes, 1981, 39. 20. Barthes, 1981, 49. 21. Barthes, 1981, 24. 22. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, La Pénultième est Morte (Paris: L’Or d’Atlante, Champ Vallon, 1993), 83. 23. Barthes, 1981, 110. 24. Barthes, 1981, 72. 25. Barthes, 1981, 81. 26. Barthes, 1981, 81.

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Notes

27. See Chapter 3 and more precisely the definition of introjection by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok in “Introjection-Incorporation Mourning or Melancholia,” Psychoanalysis in France, 6: “to introject a wish, a grief, a situation is to dispose of it through a communion of empty mouths.” 28. Kristeva, 1989, 43. 29. Kristeva, 1989, 43. 30. Santner, 1990, 2. 31. Abraham and Torok, 1980, 4. 32. This corresponds to what Abraham and Torok call the constitution of a “crypt” in the subject. In “The Topography of Reality: Sketching a Metapsychology of Secrets,” Oxford Literary Review, 12, no. 1–2, 1990: 65, they outline a preliminary statement of the particularity of the crypt as follows: “The crypt is neither the dynamic Unconscious nor the ego of introjections. Rather, it is an enclave between the two, a kind of artificial Unconscious, lodged in the very midst of the ego. Such a tomb has the effect of sealing up the permeable walls of the dynamic unconscious. Nothing at all must filter from the outside world. The ego is given the task of cemetery guard. We shall call the tomb and its lock preservative repression, setting it off from the constitutive repression . . . generally called dynamic repression.” For the cryptophore, the desire is not born of repression and does not find a way out through detours. This is the main difference between dynamic and preservative repression. The desire of the “cryptophore” is fulfilled and therefore must lie buried. “Nothing can undo its having been consummated or efface its memory. This reality cannot quite die, nor can it hope to revive.” 33. Sepia, which is used to fix the print perfectly embodies the magic status quo that photography represents for the melancholic: sepia on the one hand fixes and preserves the print, while, on the other hand, it gives the print the brownish color of rot. Etymologically sepia means “to make rotten.” Dead and undead, the object of love too is preserved in the vault and yet rotting in the outside world. 34. Barthes, 1981, 15. 35. Barthes, 1981, 40. 36. See Abraham and Torok, 1986, 18. The linguistic remnants of a repression enacted on the words that could betray desire return from the crypt. These remnants are altered and relieved of their communicative function. See Chapter 3. 37. Abraham and Torok, 1986, 19. 38. Kristeva,1989, 11. 39. Barthes, 1981, 90. 40. The dialogue in the film goes as follows: ANDY: I can’t make his face but he looks old and kind. MARTIN: Kind? ANDY: Yes. Maybe it is just the photo. 41. Kristeva,1989, 61. 42. Abraham and Torok, 8. The funerary feast is “communion in the sharing of food, among survivors. Such communion can mean that rather than the person of the deceased it is our mutual presence that we are taking into our bodies in the form of assimilable food. As for the deceased, we shall deposit him in the earth and not in ourselves.”

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43. Didi-Huberman, 1987, 45. 44. See Lyotard’s conclusion to Discours, Figure, 386–7; and Chapter 1 in this volume. 45. Lyotard, 1971, 386. “Mobled queen” by association and phonetic echoes is a condensation and a displacement of the mother for Hamlet. 46. Thomas Hardy, “The Voice,” in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 346. 47. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) and Desire in Language, A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gorz, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 48. Kristeva, 1984, 28. 49. Kristeva, 1984, 65. 50. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 34. 51. Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), 40. 52. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) (reprint London: Harcourt Brace, 1927; 1981), 32. References to this edition will be noted in between brackets directly in the text. 53. Virginia Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, 247, quoted by Ferrer, n.37, 163. 54. Lily’s painting as it stages the conflict and mutual dependency of the symbolic and the Real, calls to mind Malevich’s “The Naked Icon of my Time.” See Chapter 1 and Zizek, Looking Awry, 19. The symbolic in Lily’s painting is figured as the fabric of the canvas that holds and organizes in its mesh the fluidity of the paint: “she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas” (159). 55. For a luminous and inspiring analysis of Lily’s hallucination, see Ferrer, 1990, 61–4. 56. Ferrer, 1990, 62. 57. Ferrer, 1990, 63. 58. Ferrer, 1990, 64. 59. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 86.

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Index abjection 82–7 Abraham, Nicolas 5–6, 18, 19–20, 21–3, 25, 26, 91, 95, 97–8, 100, 128; and Torok, Maria 3–5, 8–9, 19, 22, 23, 90–1, 94, 95, 108, 141, 143 alienated subject 9, 13–14, 16 Ambassadors (Holbein) 48 Ambrosio’s sexual gratification 166n anachronism 3, 67–70, 73 analepsis 15, 67–70, 80 anamorphosis 48–9 anti-discourse/non-discourse 45–53, 73–4 art: and dream-work 51–2; and elegy 147–50; see also film(s); painting(s); photography Artaud, Antonin 40–1, 43

Camera Lucida (Barthes) 134–5, 138–9, 142, 145, 148 Carmilla (Le Fanu) 25–6, 117, 119 Carroll, Lewis 40 Castle, Terry 60, 129, 163n Castricano, Jodey 3, 157n The Castle of Otranto (Walpole) 8–21, 26, 34, 37–8, 65, 71, 72–3, 77–8 catachresis and death 76–8 Chambers, Ross 27–8 chronology: anachronism 3, 67–70, 73; analepsis 15, 67–70, 80; dechronology 80–1; diachrony 13; prolepsis 15 Cixous, Hélène 83 clandestination and telepathy 104–7 class structure 72, 131 Clement, Catherine 13–14 clichés 69–70 coat, symbolism of 26–30, 34 Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White 68 Collot, Michel 49 corporeality see body Craft, Christopher 118 “crypt” 172n cryptonymy/cryptophore 6–7, 89, 90–2, 125, 143–4, 172n; melancholic crypt of Frankenstein 91–100 “cryptophore” 172n

Barthes, Roland 61, 77; Camera Lucida 134–5, 138–9, 142, 145, 148; “Deliberation” 135; Proof (Moorhouse) 136, 137, 139–47, 148 Bateson, Gregory 41–2 Bellemin-Noël, Jean 45 Beyerlen, Angelo 112–13 “Bleeding Nun” 76, 78–81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 166n blood 28, 85, 94–5, 96, 99, 105, 118, 132; of Christ 136–7, 147–8 bloodline see origin of the subject body: abjection 83–5; in language 39–42; reading 52–8 Bonnefoy, Yves 56 Boudinet, Daniel 135 broken words and fragments of language 75–6 Brooke-Rose, Christine 61 Brooks, Peter 81 Buse, P. and Stott, A. 1 Butor, Michael 110

Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (Lowry) 49–50 Davis, Colin 4 Davis, Michael 25–6 death and catachresis 76–8 dechronology 80–1 deixis/deitics 47, 135, 136 dejection/spleen 26, 30, 34–5 Deleuze, Gilles 40–1, 45 “Deliberation” (Barthes) 135 183

184

Index

delirium 45 “Le démon de l’analogie” (Mallarmé) 50 Derrida, Jacques 3, 4, 7, 89, 92, 97, 104, 156n–157n Dews, Peter 52 diachrony 13 Didi-Huberman, Georges 136–7, 138 difference, definition of, 161n Discours, Figure (“The Figural”) (Lyotard) 45–53, 148 discourse: anti-discourse/nondiscourse 45–53, 73–4; paternal 62–7, 68–9, 73; as system of protection 13; see also language Dolar, Mladen 34, 82 Dracula (Stoker) 68, 108–32, 169n, 170n dreams/dream analysis 1, 31–2, 38–9, 49–52, 127, 129 ego: ego-skin 99; supernatural as threat to 82 elegy and art 147–50 Ellis, Kate Ferguson 63, 164n enigmatic signifiers 23–32 etymology 166n family secrets see secrets fantastic: definition of, 162n, 163n; in literature 43–4, 56; theories of 58–62 fantasy: of incorporation 92–100; of referentiality 135–7, 138 Ferrer, Daniel 150–1, 154, 155 Fiedler, Leslie 1, 9 “The Figural”/Discours, Figure (Lyotard) 45–53, 148 “The Figure in the Carpet” ( James) 89–90 figures of speech 48–9, 76–7, 78 film(s) 111; Proof (Moorhouse) 136, 137, 139–47, 148 foreign languages and translation 100–1 “fort-da” 21–2 Foucault, Michel 118 “Fragments de la langue d’avant Babel” (Leclaire) 38–9

fragments of language 75–6 Frankenstein (Shelley) 35–6, 71, 89, 91–107, 113, 167n, 169n “free floating attention” 53, 56 Freud, Sigmund 2, 8, 9, 21–2, 51, 59, 84, 86, 87, 156n funerary feast, 172n Gautier, Théophile: Onuphrius 43–5, 62 ghosts 1, 3, 60–1, 76, 78, 87–8; see also phantomatic transmission/ “phantom carriers” Gothic, definition and aspects of 2, 3–7, 163n, 164n gramophones/phonographs 110–11, 113–14, 115, 123 Greenblatt, Steven 156n grief see melancholy hallucinations 153–5 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 19–20, 52, 148 happiness 65, 69–70 Hardy, Thomas: “The Voice” 148–50 Hartman, Geoffrey 33, 34 hauntology 3–4 heimlich/unheimlich 39, 48, 84, 86, 109, 145 Holbein, Hans 48 homophony 166n homosexuality 38–9 horror vs terror, novels of 62–3 Hume, Katherine 59 “I” 31–2, 83, 85, 87–8, 149 “The I as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendahl’s Life of Henry Brulard” (Marin) 54–5 identity of the subject 13–14, 16, 68 “ill literacy” 55–6 illegitimacy 9, 15, 16–17, 20, 71, 72–3, 104, 130–1 immobile mobility 46, 47–8, 52 incorporation: fantasy of 92–100; vs introjection 6, 7, 95 index, photograph as 135–6, 137, 146 interference(s) 105, 106, 108, 110–11, 121

Index L’Intersigne (Villiers de L’Isle Adam) 26–31, 34–5 intersubjective psyche 8, 9 introjection 141; vs incorporation 6, 7, 95 The Italian (Radcliffe) 65, 72, 73 Jackson, Rosemary 59, 62, 163n James, Henry: “The Figure in the Carpet” 89–90 Jean-Claude Milner 160n Kaës, René 157n Kiely, Robert 73–4 Kilgour, Maggie 67 Kittler, Friedrich A. 109–10, 112–13, 114, 119 Klee, Paul 56 knowledge: heimlich/unheimlich 39, 48, 84, 86, 109, 145; and memory 111–12, 114–15, 123 Kristeva, Julia 83–4, 85–6, 133, 141, 149–50, 151 Lacan, Jacques 13–14, 37, 48, 50 lalangue, concept of 37–9, 45 language: affect in 147–50; broken word and fragments of 75–6; catachresis and death in 76–8; foreign languages and translation 100–1; literal 43–5; as “other” 22–3; and photography 134–5; the Real in 33–9; schizophrenic 39–42; see also discourse; signifiers/ signification; symbolization/ symbolic Laplanche, Jean 8, 9, 23–5, 27, 31, 159n; and Leclaire, Serge: “The Unconscious” 31–2 law, definition of 168n Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan: Carmilla 25–6, 117, 119 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 37, 93 Leclaire, Serge: “Fragments de la langue d’avant Babel” 38–9; Laplanche, Jean and: “The Unconscious” 31–2

185

Lewis, Matthew Gregory: The Monk 43, 63, 64, 65, 70, 76, 78–87, 165n–166n lineage (origin of the subject) 16–17, 70–4, 76, 77–8, 102–4, 131 L’Intersigne (Villiers de L’Isle Adam) 26–31, 34–5 Lowry, Malcolm: Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid 49–50 Lyotard, Jean-François 52–3, 56, 59, 164n; “The Figural” (Discours, Figure) 45–53, 148 Madoff, Mark 67, 164 magic lantern image 58–9, 61, 129 Malevich, Kazimir 35, 37 Mallarmé, Stéphane: “Le démon de l’analogie” 50; “Le Mystère dans les lettres” 133 Mannoni, Octave 49–50 Marin, Louis: “The I as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendahl’s Life of Henry Brulard” 54–5 Massé, Michelle 2 Maudsley, Henry 108 Meditations (Saint Bernard) 28 melancholy 58–9, 87–8; loss of mother 81–2, 83–7, 91–104, 127–8, 138–9, 140–7; vs mourning 87; as other of language 133–4, 141; and schizophrenic language 41, 42; and zoophagy 124–5 Mellor, Anne K. 96, 106 memory 111–12, 114–15, 123, 126, 127 metaphor and anamorphosis 48–9 Miles, Robert 163n Milner, Jean-Claude 38 mirror/mirroring 13–14, 16, 36 Mishra, Vijay 71, 73 Modernism and Romanticism 109–10 Moglen, Helene 9, 157n The Monk (Lewis) 43, 63, 64, 65, 70, 76, 78–87, 165n–166n Morris, David 82

186

Index

mother–child relationship 21–2, 24–5; loss and melancholy 81–2, 83–7, 91–104, 127–8, 138–9, 140–7 mourning 7; vs melancholy 87; see also melancholy Mudge,Bradford K. 64 “Le Mystère dans les lettres” (Mallarmé) 133 The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe) 60–1, 62–3, 64–6, 67, 68–70, 72, 74, 75, 149 The Mysterious Mother (Walpole) 73 Nadar, Paul 134 The Naked Unframed Icon of My Time (Malevich) 35, 37 “nec-romance” 8–18 need and satisfaction 31 nerves, as communication network 98–9, 114–15, 120, 121, 124, 132 “nescience” 18, 127–8 non-discourse/anti-discourse 45–53, 73–4 The Old English Baron (Reeve) 72 Olorenshaw, Robert 110, 116 Onuphrius (Gautier) 43–5, 62 origin of the subject 16–17, 70–4, 76, 77–8, 102–4, 131 “other” 63, 81, 84; figural as 46; language as 22–3; melancholy and language 133–4, 141 oxymoron 76, 78–9, 82 painting(s) 43–5, 48–9, 56; Ambassadors (Holbein) 48; in Frankenstein (Shelley) 89, 102, 103; The Naked Unframed Icon of My Time (Malevich) 35, 37; Mark Rothko 35; in To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 150–5 Parkins-Gounelas, Ruth 3 paternal narrative/discourse 62–7, 68–9, 73 phantomatic transmission/“phantom carriers” 4–6, 9, 18–23, 58; Dracula (Stoker) 108, 125–6,

127–8, 130–1, 132; Frankenstein (Shelley) 92, 106 “phonemic reading”/“phonotext” 52–8 phonographs/gramophones 110–11, 113–14, 115, 123 photography: Camera Lucida (Barthes) 134–5, 138–9, 142, 145, 148; and fantasy of referentiality 135–7, 138; Proof (Moorhouse) 136, 137, 139–47; punctum 137–9; Turin Shroud 136–7, 147–8 Pollock, Jonathan 165n Pope, Rebecca 117–18 primal seduction 24–5, 27 prolepsis and analepsis 15 Proof (Moorhouse) 136, 137, 139–47, 148 Proust, Marcel: Rememberance of Things Past 58–9 psychoanalytical perspective 1, 2, 3–4, 8–9; see also Abraham, Nicolas; Freud, Sigmund; Laplanche, Jean punctum analogy of photography 137–9 puns 15–16, 97 Punter, David 57, 60, 168n QWERTY keyboard, 169n–170n Radcliffe, Ann: The Italian (Radcliffe) 65, 72, 73; The Mysteries of Udolpho 60–1, 62–3, 64–6, 67, 68–70, 72, 74, 75, 149, 164n Rashkin, Esther 26–7, 159n Readings, Bill 48 the Real in language 33–9 reality 34; vs the Real 35 Reeve, Claire: The Old English Baron 72 remainder 33–5, 37 Rememberance of Things Past (Proust) 58–9 reversal of maturity 67–9 Rickels, Laurence A. 96, 115

Index Romanticism and Modernism 109–10 Ronell, Avital: The Telephone Book 98–9 Rosset, Clément 36 Rothko, Mark 35 Royle, Nicholas 3, 4, 163n Said, Edward 63, 67 Saint Bernard: Mediations 28 Santner, Eric L. 87 Saudo, Nathalie 168n schizophrenic language 39–42 secretions 109, 111, 118, 130 secrets 9, 15, 16–21, 26–8, 68, 90; and dechronology 80–1; female passion 117–18; “secretion” and “secretary” 109, 111; transmissions 125–31 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 70, 74 seduction and enigmatic signifiers 23–32 self see ego; “I”; identity of the subject; origin of the subject semiotic and symbolic signifying process 149–50, 151 sepia, 172n sexuality 78–9, 131; homosexuality 38–9; see also mother–child relationship Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 19–20, 52, 148 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 35–6, 71, 89, 91–107, 113 Shelley, P.B. 92, 96 Sherwin, Paul 167n signifiers/signification 16, 46–7, 74, 75, 133; enigmatic 23–32; and photography 135–6; semiotic and symbolic process 149–50, 151 “sins of the fathers” 9, 12, 17–18, 21, 32 skin 99, 101; and touch 142–3, 145–6 Smirnoff, Victor 68 spleen/dejection 26, 30, 34–5 Stewart, Garrett 53–4, 55–6

187

Stoker, Bram: Dracula 68, 108–32, 169n symbolization/symbolic 21–3, 34–7; of coat 26–30, 34; fantastic in literature 43–4, 56; and schizophrenic language 40, 41, 42; and semiotic signifying process 149–50, 151; separation of subject and world 82–3; see also cryptonymy/cryptophore telepathy and clandestination 104–7 The Telephone Book (Ronell) 98–9 terror, novels of 68–9; vs novels of horror 62–3 time see chronology To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 150–5 Todorov, Tzvetan 61, 162n–163n transgenerational hauntings: enigmatic signifiers and seduction 23–32; Frankenstein (Shelley) 100, 105–7; remainder 33–4, 35; see also The Castle of Otranto (Walpole); phantomatic transmission/ “phantom carriers” translation of foreign languages 100–1 Turin Shroud 136–7, 147–8 typewriter technology (“transcript”/ “transcrypt”) 110–21, 123, 132 uncanny 81–2, 83, 84, 87–8, 163n “The Unconscious” (Laplanche and Leclaire) 31–2 unheimlich/heimlich 39, 48, 84, 86, 109, 145 vampirism 111, 116 vampirization of speech 115–16 Villiers de L’Isle, Adam: L’Intersigne 26–31, 34–5 virginity 70, 85 “The Voice” (Hardy) 148–50

188

Index

Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto 8–21, 26, 34, 37–8, 65, 71, 72–3, 77–8; The Mysterious Mother 73 Wicke, Jennifer 111, 115–16 Williams, Anne 66, 73, 164n Wolfreys, Julian 3

The Woman in White (Collins) 68 Woolf, Leonard 124 Woolf, Virginia 55–6; To the Lighthouse 150–5 zoophagy 124–5 Žižek, Slavoj 34, 35, 37