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PALGRAVE GOTHIC
Gothic
Hauntology
Everyday Hauntings
and Epistemological Desire
Joakim Wrethed
Luke Roberts
Palgrave Gothic
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a desig-
nation for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatis-
fied with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the
Gothic was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the
emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident
throughout contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television pro-
grammes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre,
ghostly tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented
online. It is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influ-
ence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new genera-
tion. This series offers readers the very best in new international research
and scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and
diversity of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to
the eighteenth century, the Palgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new
discussions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities
emerging in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of
obsolescence.
Joakim Wrethed
Gothic Hauntology
Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire
Joakim Wrethed
English Department
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden
ISSN 2634-6214 ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic)

Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-3-031-41110-6 ISBN 978-3-031-41111-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3
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Book Blurb
Gothic Hauntology: Everyday Hauntings

and Epistemological Desire
The study pursues the phenomenon of hauntology within the gothic

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

reasonable way of understanding life as an experiential movement. The
gothic has always filled the function of reminding us of our vulnerability
and to beware of rational and scientific hubris. This study confirms that
this is also the case in contemporary fiction.
Contents
1 Introduction:
“Avaunt! And Quit My Sight! Let the Earth
Hide Thee!” 1
2 “Penelope
Was Not a Phantom”: Everyday Hauntology in
Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood 27
3 “His
Eye Spoke Less than His Lip”: Hauntology, Vampires
and the Trace of the Animal in John Polidori’s The
Vampyre, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In,
Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling and Guillermo del Toro’s
Cronos 45
4 “Nothing
Is but What Is Not”: Spectral Temporality and
Hauntology in Selected Works by Edgar Allan Poe 67
5 “The
Gray Pool and Its Blank, Haunted Edge”: The
Hauntology of Indeterminacy in Henry James’s The Turn
of the Screw 89
6 “Light
Is Dark and Dark Is Light”: H. P. Lovecraft and
Hauntology as Epistemological Desire105
vii
viii Contents
7 “What
She Had Seen Was Final”: Everyday Hauntology,
the Threat of Male Violence and the Power of Fiction in
Alice Munro’s “Free Radicals”, “Runaway” and “Passion”127
8 Concluding
Remarks: “I Can Feel My Lost Child
Surfacing Within Me”151
Bibliography Gothic Hauntology157
Index163
About the Author
Joakim Wrethed has hitherto mainly worked in Irish Studies—especially

on John Banville—but he also explores the contemporary novel in English
more generally without any primary emphasis on national boundaries.
Phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics, gothic literature and theol-
ogy are overarching topics of his scholarly work. Some of the more recent
publications have been on the postmodern gothic, the gothic origins of
Charles Maturin, aesthetics, the anthropocene and the posthuman zeit-
geist. Forthcoming with Routledge 2023 is a chapter in Literature and
Art: “Conceptual and Performative Art in Tom McCarthy, Michel
Houellebecq and Don DeLillo”. Wrethed has worked on hauntology and
the gothic since 2021.
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: “Avaunt! And Quit My Sight!

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

whole category of the gothic, even though ‘bedrock’ is perhaps a bad
word choice when speaking of ghosts and such an ephemeral concept.
‘Gothic hauntology’ actually sounds like a tautology. This is so mainly
because of the massive presence of the past as a general ontological feature
and pervasive narratological function within this particular genre of litera-
ture. Speaking with literary history in mind, the gothic was from the
beginning constructed out of a specific literary representation of an, at
least partly, imagined or re-imagined historical era.1 Speaking more
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_1
2 J. WRETHED
generally about the function of the past, in cases when it is not felt to be
always present, it may instead appear as a similar phenomenon in its per-
petual possible return—and sometimes actual return—in various types of
narratological arrangements. For instance, something of the past or per-
haps even a particular character—which a protagonist thought was forever
left behind in her or his life—suddenly reappears and brings all of that
troubled history back. Such a re-emergence of the past potentially calls for
different theoretical frameworks, which a quick glance at literary history
would swiftly confirm. Examples may be Schelling, Freud, Bloom, Lacan,
Kristeva, Fisher and Derrida, just to mention a few labels of such possible
conceptual configurations, which are intellectual hauntings of the haunt-
ing, so to speak. A very general experiential principle underpinning the
particular obsession with the past can be elucidated by Søren Kirkegaard’s
pertinent observation that we are forced to live our lives forwards, but
apparently—because of some experiential or cognitive law—we are com-
pelled to understand them backwards.2 This means that the past has to be
continuously processed, interpreted and re-interpreted, obviously both on
an individual and on a cultural or collective historical level. There are two
paths in every life and in every community, one leading forward and the
other leading backwards. We seem to always be travelling on both trails
simultaneously. Interestingly, this phenomenon also constitutes the cen-
tral structure of a great deal of crime fiction, which in many ways is a close
relative of the gothic genre.3 Typically, crime fiction displays the journey
from the corpse to the crime on the backwards path and the forward-
moving investigation in the other direction, as it were.
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—the work seen by many as the
first one in the early wave of gothic narratives—unquestionably contains
the prominent characteristic of a powerful past.4 An unjust or somehow
immoral event or action in history haunts the characters of the narrative in
the present. We could certainly go further back in literary history to look
for similar examples, but it is perhaps more fruitful for this study to move
forwards in time. Along those lines of thinking, Merlin Coverley makes a
similar observation about the ubiquity of the past and hauntology as a
conspicuous part of our contemporary zeitgeist:
Hauntology, it would seem, has expanded its remit to bring everything it

touches within its ghostly embrace: the individual psyche, haunted by past
trauma; the family, governed by the repressive cycle of patriarchy; religion,
built upon the repetition and re-enactment of ritual; society, the patriarchal
1 INTRODUCTION: “AVAUNT! AND QUIT MY SIGHT! LET THE EARTH HIDE… 3
relationship writ large; and history itself, endlessly revisited by the ghosts of
all its pasts. Just as once the world was seen as uncanny, so now it appears
hauntological.5
However, generally speaking, a too vastly “expanded […] remit” of the

concept may become next to useless for readers and scholars alike. If it
applies to the majority, or perhaps even all, gothic narratives, how can it
possess any analytic and conceptual value? Therefore, the purpose of this
introduction is to provide an overview of possible variations of hauntology
and closely related phenomena, while moving steadily towards a more
strictly conceived understanding of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntol-
ogy, as presented in his work Specters of Marx.6 In addition, another con-
sideration that has to be dealt with in this introduction is that if we expand
the notion of the gothic, it seems that the number of narratives becomes
almost endless, and sooner or later we will end up so far from a genre defi-
nition that the term ‘gothic’ dissolves into meaninglessness. However, it
has been argued that the gothic genre was very broad already from the
outset. In Contesting the Gothic, James Watt argues that the whole idea of
the gothic as a generically structured category is by and large a modern
construction.
Though the genre of the Gothic romance clearly owes its name to the sub-
title of The Castle of Otranto’s second edition, ‘A Gothic Story’, the eleva-
tion of Walpole’s work to the status of an origin has served to grant an
illusory stability to a body of fiction which is distinctly heterogeneous. Face-
value readings of the preface to Otranto’s second edition have encouraged
the idea that Walpole issued a manifesto for a new literary genre, the emer-
gence of which was coincident with a revival of imagination in an era that
privileged rationality. As I will argue, however, any categorization of the
Gothic as a continuous tradition, with a generic significance, is unable to do
justice to the diversity of the romances which are now accommodated under
the ‘Gothic’ label, and liable to overlook the often antagonistic relations
that existed between different works or writers.7
The heterogeneity that unfolds in the works pursued in this study is then
constituting more of a return to an ‘original’ heterogeneity rather than
showcasing an increasing deviance from an original prototype. In investi-
gating various aspects of the hauntological, however, it will inevitably
mean that some gothic tropes are more involved than others. The haunto-
logical phenomenon undeniably also verges on other huge fields within
4 J. WRETHED
the humanities, which have been in focus recently and are still vibrant,
such as for instance memory studies and trauma theory.8 The purpose of
the investigations below is mainly to outline how the diversity of haunto-
logical phenomena may appear in works that are more or less falling within
the category of gothic fiction. The somewhat elastic conceptualisation of
hauntology is utilised more as an asset than a shortcoming.9 The selection
of works is deliberately done in order to cover a larger historical period
with few representative works, partly with the aim to display the versatility
of the concept that obviously goes hand in hand with the flexibility of the
gothic. Sometimes the analyses may perhaps say more about hauntology
than about the works themselves, but that is also part of the intention with
the overall setup of the investigation.
As can be seen above—in the epigraphic display of two major dictionary
definitions of the verb ‘haunt’, as the root in ‘hauntology’—the definitions
taken together clearly make up an invitation to limitrophic (border-
transgressing) dynamics. The more concrete side of the hauntological
Janus face has got to do with ‘real’ phenomena, such as memories or dis-
eases, while the other side deals with phenomena that more pertain to
fiction and imagination, “disembodied spirits”. The similarities in the ways
of phenomenalisation give rise to slidings and glidings on an ontological
plane, which carries with it hauntological effects. A chimera is both a natu-
ral science phenomenon and a figure of imagination. The questions quickly
pile up. Is it worse or better to be haunted by nightmares than by diseases?
Is it better or worse to be haunted by a stalker or by traumatic experiences?
When does a feeling correspond to a real object in the world of objects
and when is a feeling just true to itself as an appearance, a certain mood, a
plague of unpleasant affective visitations?10 I shall outline a few general
hauntological aspects below and then gradually move towards more subtle
distinctions and more philosophically elaborate thinking. At the end of
these introductory pages, I will outline the different chapters, in order to
give the reader a foreshadowing of what is to be expected. The general
phenomena are suitable as backdrops to many of the narratives dealt with.
Most often, hauntology is so taken for granted that the reader perhaps
does not even notice exactly how these forces are there and how they
operate.
Loss
The sense of loss can be seen as a very broad understanding of one type of
haunting. Obviously, this type could refer to either a very specific one, in
terms of the loss of a person, or of a more general version that verges on
existential, religious or mythical dimensions. Even more variation is pos-
sible, since these two types of concrete and more abstract levels may actu-
ally operate in parallel. To illustrate what this may look like, we can turn to
the phenomenon of the missing person that definitely traverses the genres
of crime fiction, horror fiction and the gothic. For instance in Margaret
Atwood’s novel Surfacing (1972), the protagonist’s father has gone miss-
ing in the wilderness, somewhere in the vicinity of the family summer-
house.11 When the protagonist goes to the house together with her friends,
she has the semi-hidden agenda of wanting to search for the father’s body
and to find the answer to what might have happened to him. This whole
order of things metamorphoses into a quest for the father in a broader
sense and also a search for the protagonist’s own lost self that haunts her
and the whole narrative. This sense of loss may even overlap with a vaster
Christian experience of the loss of innocence, the theologically central loss
of paradise, which governs several different structures of feeling within
literature more generally (nostalgia, retromania, pastiche, etc.). In addi-
tion, we have the whole kit and caboodle of the psychoanalytic framework,
probably foremost represented by the ‘lack’ as a founding principle in the
philosophy of Jacques Lacan and in his legions of psychoanalytic disciples.
Accompanying the sense of loss is evidently a general feeling of unknow-
ing. This affective mood can appear on the small scale as well as the larger
scale. For instance, the unnamed protagonist in Surfacing truly does not
know what has befallen her father. She knows somewhere deep inside what
has happened to her own self earlier in her life, but these difficult experi-
ences have been blocked and are caught in a vortex of affective returns.
Therefore, the protagonist is haunted in two ways, but these tend to
merge in her overall and arduous journey towards a higher level of aware-
ness. Focusing more strictly on the gothic genre, we may state that quite
often the unknowing has an even vaster superstructure, that is, an igno-
rance that will never really be converted into knowing. To be sure, this
feature indicates the ultimate gothic rebellion against any overly rational
outlook on the world, which for instance could be derived from
Enlightenment ideals or the epistemological convictions and truisms
founding the natural sciences. It shall be a theme below how some
6 J. WRETHED
modern gothic variations of this topic are clad in more everyday and per-
haps psychologically realistic robes, as we will see for instance in Atwood’s
and Munro’s fiction. But first, a few more related hauntological phenom-
ena, before we zoom in on a stricter definition of hauntology derived
mainly from Derrida.
Guilt
The phenomenon of guilt is a common constituent of the gothic genre.
For instance, a large number of Poe’s short stories may be situated some-
where within the boundary areas between horror, crime and the gothic.
These narratives are not seldomly draped in the cold sweat of guilt.
Illustrative examples are Poe’s classic short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart”
and “The Black Cat”. The protagonists’ sense of guilt in these pieces is so
powerful that it conjures the overtones of there being something super-
natural at work. However, the narratives could also clearly be read as some
form of psychological realism, if the reader prefers that kind of perspective.
The ghostly dimensions of such a past that refuses to be laid to rest are
noticeable. As is well known from earlier phases of history, murder victims
were sometimes nailed to the ground in order to prevent them from walk-
ing again (one example is Bockstensmannen, The Bocksten Man—a mur-
der victim from 1340–1370 that was found well preserved in a bog in
1936—who had three wooden poles pierced through his body, one of
them through his heart, which was of course the stake made of oak, the
best wood).12 This practice is also what gives the background to much of
the impaling paraphernalia in vampire narratives. The phenomenological
or anthropological aspect of the phenomenon is obviously to ritualise and
thereby make manifest the strong urge to concretely harness, and poten-
tially and hopefully even eliminate the inevitable feeling of guilt (one
almost hears the sinister snicker of a mocking gothic figure at the thought
of succeeding with such an undertaking). The belief in the agency and
power of the undead can also be seen in Macbeth that provides us with an
early gothic example through the ghost of Banquo: “Avaunt! and quit my
sight! let the earth hide thee! / Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is
cold; / Thou hast no speculation in those eyes, / Which thou dost glare
with”.13 The ghost is always more powerful than the ‘real thing’.
As becomes evident, the sense of guilt may have very concrete and
commonsensically valid reasons in the cases of murder, which is something
that invites causal thinking. However, guilt can also be instilled in
individuals through cultural practice. Branches of Christianity have guilt as

a central force that is emphasised to varying degree. The towering shadow
of original sin seemingly produces more sin. The gothic sensitivity to such
affective patterns is discernible in for instance Charles Maturin’s Melmoth
the Wanderer. The monastery that one of the narrators was locked into
tries so hard to avoid sinning that the institution itself becomes a dark
torture chamber and prison of the soul, clearly light-years (or dark-years
actually) away from praising the God of light, redemption and love. To be
haunted by guilt may then become a burden that characters in various
ways try to cast off. For instance, in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the pro-
tagonist’s crime is revealed by the overwhelming power of his own guilt.
He becomes so paranoid that his imagined aural perception—indicating
that the visiting policemen really know the truth about his crime—becomes
so intense that it reifies, seemingly completely as an autonomous affective
force. The underlying power is of course semi-conscious guilt overcoming
the self-confident braggart: “[A]nything was better than this agony!
Anything was more tolerable than this derision!”14
The Uncanny
Coverley suggests that hauntology has replaced the uncanny as the domi-
nant structure of feeling. Still, many aspects of haunting seem to overlap
with the uncanny. We shall just briefly consider the connection of hauntol-
ogy and the uncanny. If we focus as much as possible on Freud’s original
essay “The Uncanny” (1919), we can say that the conceptual overlap with
hauntology is significant. In the essay, Freud—seemingly suddenly over-
come with some form of intellectual desperation or frenzy—presents a
plethora of dictionary definitions in the very beginning of the essay. Thus,
Freud tries to pin down the phenomenon semantically, which contributes
pointedly to the uncanniness of the essay itself that many scholars have
commented on.15 The pinning down of the conceptual spectre proves to
be very difficult—a not very surprising realisation if we would ask
Derrida—but there is a key to hauntology in one of Freud’s attempts at
defining the concept more clearly:
To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do

with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts. Indeed, we have
heard that in some modern languages the German phrase ein unheimliches
Haus [‘an uncanny house’] can be rendered only by the periphrasis ‘a
8 J. WRETHED
haunted house’. We might in fact have begun our investigation with this
example of the uncanny—perhaps the most potent—but we did not do so
because here the uncanny is too much mixed up with the gruesome and
partly overlaid by it.16
Even though the similarity between the concepts ‘uncanny’ and ‘haunt-
ing’ is that they share the uncertainty of the validity of boundaries and
borders, there is also a central difference between them. For instance,
Freud mainly pursues temporality in terms of the return. The ‘time is out
of joint’ aspect does not seem to be as central as it is in Derrida’s definition
of hauntology, which will be outlined below. Moreover, Freud explicitly
contends that the more clear-cut ghostly figures that we find in literature
are not necessarily uncanny per se: “The souls in Dante’s Inferno or the
ghostly apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar
may be dark and terrifying, but at bottom they are no more uncanny than,
say, the serene world of Homer’s gods”.17 Thus, this state of affairs accen-
tuates that the hauntological dimension that we will gradually hone in on
has got to do more with temporality and limitrophy, but that does not
mean that phenomena within this hauntology cannot be uncanny. In fact,
a great deal of the gothic aspects in everyday gothic or domestic gothic
can be seen as uncanny, especially in the way that they highlight borderline
indeterminacies (limitrophic phenomena). What can be said as a more
clear-cut distinction in relation to Freud is that a consequence of the
Derridean hauntology is that also the future is involved, especially in Mark
Fisher’s emphasis on the mourning of lost futures.
Having a special focus on Victorian hauntings, Julian Wolfreys also
draws attention to the close connection between the uncanny and hauntol-
ogy, especially in the stock item of the haunted house, which of course
then needs to thematise domestic spaces and architectural phenomena.
The act of haunting is effective because it displaces us in those places we feel

most secure, most notably in our homes, in the domestic scene. Indeed,
haunting is nothing other than the destabilization of the domestic scene, as
that place where we feel most at home with ourselves […] The haunted
house is a stock structural and narrative figure, whether one thinks of Henry
James’ The Turn of the Screw, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or
Stephen King’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) The Shining, to take some obvious
examples. As Jacques Derrida puts it […] ‘haunting implies places, a habita-
tion, and always a haunted house’. Indeed, […] the Freudian uncanny relies
on the literal meaning and the slippage of, and within, the German unheim-
lich, meaning literally ‘unhomely’. For Freud that which is unhomely

emerges in the homely. Haunting cannot take place without the possibility
of its internal eruption and interruption within and as a condition of a famil-
iar, everyday place and space.18
This argument shows the overlapping of the concepts in this study, but it
also reveals the parts that do not overlap. The hauntology pursued here
will sometimes make itself manifest in the typical milieus referred to above,
but at other times there will be less or no emphasis on houses and homes.
Instead, the focus may shift to temporality and life choices, roads taken
and roads not taken haunting the characters, displaying hauntology as a
general force that is very hard, if not impossible, to avoid. Strictly speak-
ing, Freudian—and in extension other psychoanalytic—versions of the
uncanny and hauntology are understandably very much concerned with
how the past determines the life of a subject in the present. Such struc-
tures will also be part of what follows below, but there will in addition be
other aspects of hauntology that are analysed. In the broadest possible
terms, the focus will be on limitrophic phenomena that disturb any attempt
at mapping out some kind of stable and intelligible ontology.
Another important connection between hauntology and the uncanny
introduces the next section below. It is of course impossible to avoid the
deconstructive aspects of hauntology, since after all, it is a Derridean con-
cept, which really does not invent gothic hauntology, but it concentrates
the attention to how literary texts—or perhaps even all texts—seem to
work in relation to semantic ghosts and temporality as related to struc-
tures or fluxes of meaning. Nicholas Royle neatly sums this up:
Another name for uncanny overflow might be deconstruction.

Deconstruction makes the most apparently familiar texts strange, it renders
the most apparently unequivocal and self-assured statements uncertain.
With a persistence or consistency that can itself seem uncanny, it shows how
difference operates at the heart of identity, how the strange and even
unthinkable is a necessary condition of what is conventional, familiar and
taken-for-granted. Deconstruction involves explorations of the surprising,
indeed incalculable effects of all kinds of virus and parasite, foreign body,
supplement, borders and margins, spectrality and haunting.19
All of these aspects will appear in various ways in the actual readings and
analyses that follow in the chapters of this study.
10 J. WRETHED
Derridean Hauntology
In order to narrow down the scope of the vast domain of hauntology, we
shall take the backwards path to Derrida’s original ideas in Specters of
Marx. As many scholars have remarked, the actual concept does not seem
to be very prominent in Derrida’s work. He only explicitly uses the term
three times. However, it subsequently proved to be very prolific in the
academic sphere, and it has been widely spread and used also within gothic
studies during the late twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first cen-
tury, and in addition, it is still prominent within literary and cultural stud-
ies. It must first of all be made clear that Derrida conceptualises in very
close contact with temporality. The polemical starting point is Francis
Fukuyama’s notorious 1989 article “The End of History” that was
expanded into a book in 1992.20 Fukuyama’s basic contention is that with
the collapse of the Eastern bloc of the Cold War, communism was ended
or dead, leaving space only for Western liberal capitalism. Expressed in a
simplified and concise form, Derrida’s take is that something that had not
fully arrived—and was always already haunting Europe—could not die.
According to Derrida, this is a general principle of spectrality.
If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt [the] reas-
suring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the
actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed
to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even
the simulacrum in general, and so forth. There is first of all the doubtful
contemporaneity of the present to itself. Before knowing whether one can
differentiate between the specter of the past and the specter of the future, of
the past present and the future present, one must ask oneself whether the
spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this
dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other.21
There are two major consequences of such a re-conceptualisation of

‘ontology’. One cannot kill a ghost and attempts to do so rather conjure
than eliminate. The second starting point that Derrida establishes is Marx’s
statement in Das Kapital that communism is a ghost that already haunts
Europe and that Derrida links to Shakespeare’s Hamlet with its pertinent
exclamation “The time is out of ioynt […]” (Act I, sc. v). This provides an
inlet to thinking about time that cannot eradicate spectrality. Presence is
not stable in the first place; therefore, the spectre cannot be nailed down,
it cannot die. That is the essence of spectrality and hauntology, if we
construe the concept in the way we are compelled to see it as more strictly
derived from Derrida. As the French philosopher states: “Let us call it a
hauntology”.22 If we move this conceptualisation of hauntology over into
the sphere of narratology, there will be other slightly different outcomes
that have relevance for the readings to come.23
As is clear, narratological alchemy implies that time is always already
plastic in the hands of the creative agent. The form of the short story very
much highlights this temporal plasticity, since the ‘space-time’ of narration
is rather limited. Features such as in medias res, flashbacks and prolepses
are frequent, presumably in order to convey as much as possible of an
experiential complexity in a smaller spatio-temporal sphere. These tech-
niques have arguably been used to perfection for instance in Munro and
Atwood. In addition, there is the partly thematised aspect of the forkings
of life paths, of roads taken always implying roads not taken. In terms of
haunting, such an aspect of narrativity will always be of relevance, since the
lost life will always linger and sometimes it will haunt. Especially in
Munro’s fiction, we shall encounter narrative patterns that mirror life pat-
terns, and there will always be the same sense of absolute chance and
absolute fatality, almost as if these opposites were the same thing. To sum
up the major foci in the coming analyses, we see that temporality, limitro-
phy and the power of the past, or the presence of the past in the present,
will be prominent features in the analyses below.
Recent Hauntology Studies

Ever since the 1990s and the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx,
hauntology has haunted literary studies, and various aspects of ghosts
within prose fiction have been scrutinised on different ontological levels.
However, it is also useful to have a look at some more recent studies of
hauntology in order to situate the coming chapters theoretically. Mark
Fisher had an almost uncanny ability to diagnose the contemporary ideo-
logical situation. In Ghosts of My Life, he pursues a hauntology that he
claims has saturated our time to such an extent that we hardly discern the
phenomenon any longer. Since Fisher mainly traces hauntology in popular
fiction, he probably has the ability to capture its most recent shape and the
speed with which it moves, or perhaps more accurately, the speed with
which it loses speed and almost gets stuck in a frenzy of recycling, posing
as perpetual novelty.
12 J. WRETHED
It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by the

same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in their
final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial
frenzy of ‘newness’ of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up of time’, the
montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so
prevalent that [it] is no longer even noticed.24
Sapphire and Steel, the TV-series referred to, contained agents that basi-
cally were supposed to repair fissures in time. Anachronism would be a
prominent feature. As compared to the hauntology pursued in the follow-
ing chapters, anachronism will not be particularly much in focus, but
through the transcendence of time and the appearances of forces that do
not seem to be stuck in time in the way a human life is, there will appear
temporal clashes that have the flavour of anachronism. This is especially
the case when it comes to the category of vampires. However, generally
speaking, hauntology encapsulates the free-moving temporality of affec-
tivity. In terms of how it feels, or would feel, to be haunted, is most cer-
tainly not different in the nineteenth century or the twentieth century, and
in terms of more modern ‘realistic’ hauntology, it is just the props and the
paraphernalia that are different. It does not matter really if hauntology is
seen through a phenomenological or psychoanalytical lens. These forces
haunt traditional rationality itself, which is presumably why they are such
prominent features in the gothic genre.
To understand Fisher’s idea of hauntology, one must first grasp what he
means by capitalist realism. Basically, this means that capitalism has now
become so pervasive that it is not even possible to imagine an alternative.
However, what Fisher emphasises in addition is the obstinacy of the ghost
itself, no matter what form it takes.
Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing

to give up the ghost or—and this can sometimes amount to the same
thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow
us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world
governed by capitalist realism.25
Fisher is obviously analysing hauntology in larger movements of cultural

evolution, but the statement about the ghost not being able to leave us
alone seems to have almost universal validity within the world of prose fic-
tion.26 The narratives analysed below are from a time span of at least 200
years. Haunting takes different ‘outer’ forms, but the temporal structures
and the core affectivity remain roughly the same.
As mentioned above, Merlin Coverley takes a broad grip on hauntology
and displays both the history of the concept and its current currency. It is
when he explicates Derrida’s hauntology that his thinking becomes most
relevant for this study. Coverley emphasises temporality but also its clear
Derridean link to limitrophy and deconstructive thinking and interpreta-
tive methodology more generally.
In the case of hauntology, nothing is more illustrative of the border between

being and non-being, than that which could be said to be characteristic of
both: the ghost. Simultaneously present yet absent, dead yet living, corpo-
real yet intangible, in time yet timeless, the figure of the ghost fits perfectly
within Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, its uncanny presence seemingly
undermining the nature of every concept it comes into contact with.27
Not only the concept of hauntology is haunted, but all concepts are
haunted by the inexactitude of available tools of definition, of durable
stakes for pinning down. Such a construal anticipates several methodolog-
ical choices that will persist through the readings that follow. Limitrophy
is used to scrutinise seemingly stable ontological features, and also the
Derridean logic of ‘both-and’ is implemented to perpetually challenge the
Aristotelian syllogisms of ‘either-or’. However, the effects of the hauntol-
ogy pursued do not end up as some form of deconstructive soup of
‘anything-goes’. The strict understanding of ‘both-and’ includes the exis-
tence of full stops, final lines, fatality and the absolute. As will be argued
below, literature itself, and especially the gothic genre, seems to be almost
incapable of pure atheism (c.f. for instance Lovecraft’s paradoxical literary
project). The ghosts make manifest a dimension that is impossible to fully
pin down, bog-men or bog-women that keep returning in the least
expected shape, and this means that even if it is not possible to pin God’s
existence down, it is equally impossible to pin down his non-existence. If
atheism would mean a complete abolition of the spiritual, hauntology
does not in any way support such a standpoint.
Katy Shaw emphasises hauntological phenomena that seem to have a
strong contemporary impact, since she focuses on twenty-first-century
English writings. However, she stresses the temporal dynamics that are
important for the present study as well.
14 J. WRETHED
Specters disturb the present with the possibility of alternative pasts and
futures. In doing so they also defy time and space, and challenge any fixity
of the temporal. This spectral effect is predicated upon the return—the act
of coming back—that questions the temporal boundaries of that which has
happened, and that which is yet to come […] The paradox of the specter is
then perhaps best understood in terms of time, of a repetitious compulsion
to return. The distortion of linear time that is required for manifestation
means that ‘there may be no proper time’ for specters; they instead function
to draw attention to the limitations of time, and the ever-present role of the
past in both the structure of haunting and the future of society.28
The label of the ghost may even be slightly misguiding, since we immedi-
ately are led to think in the direction of the disembodied. But as indicated
above, taking Derrida’s ‘both-and’ seriously, and the limitrophy that
comes with that, there will be hauntological forces that are ‘real’, which-
ever way we attempt to approach it. A pandemic has some kind of corpo-
real reality on a microscopic level, but obviously that part becomes almost
irrelevant from an experiential perspective. The affectivity of fear works in
the same way, whether material reality is involved or not. Commonsensically,
we believe that the past is fixed, even though it may be hard to access,
memory is unreliable, facts may be missing, there are problems related to
‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ realities etc. However, as suggested by several
thinkers on hauntology, it may even be the case that the future is fixed.
The future is so strongly held in the grip of the past that even though we
generally perceive it as open—a sphere of possibilities—at least fiction
plays with the idea that there is some fatal force at work. Conceivably,
what is indicated is just that human experience is as vast as the universe,
and any attempt at harnessing it, will only give birth to new enigmas and
other sets of spectres. We shall return to these aspects in a brief explication
of epistemological desire below.
First, we need to have a look at another rather recent contribution to
the field of hauntology studies. Sadeq Rahimi’s The Hauntology of Everyday
Life is very important for several of the chapters to come. Rahimi is
strongly anchored in the psychoanalytic tradition, which of course is so
immense and influential that it cannot be ignored in the present investiga-
tion either. But since so much is done via Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Zizek
and Abraham and Torok etc.—within the gothic as well as within hauntol-
ogy studies—some of this theory will be pushed towards a phenomenology
of the hauntological, so that occasionally a focus on the temporal dynamics
of hauntology will hold some of the explanatory tendencies of
psychoanalysis at bay. What is especially noteworthy for this study, in

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

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

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

tion, it would be reasonable in comparison to pin this down as pertaining
to the category of small scales. However, from the level of experiential
affectivity (immanence), there is really no significant difference in terms of
the power of hauntology. As pieces of literature, these are only different
forms for something that is more or less affectively identical. This oscilla-
tion between what seems to be large scale and small scale, macro and
micro, is what underpins hauntology throughout this study. In Atwood,
the trope of the missing person is magnified to intricacies on the root-level
of life. Here too, we witness the dimensions of unknowing and the power
of absences that control lives in ways we would perhaps rather not admit.
The gothic impact consists of a continuous haunting and taunting of the
pervasive illusion that we fully control our lives. When Rahimi talks about
“[t]he generativity of trauma”, this may be seen as an all-encompassing
feature that could just as well be labelled hauntology.30 As suggested in
Atwood’s short story, the haunting of the vast absence in that narrative
also embraces art, in this case pictorial art. When the protagonist looks at
her oil paintings, depicting the wilderness, she actually sees, or perhaps
more accurately, she feels the absence of her childhood friend: “She looks
at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of
Lucy”.31 In this chapter we look at details in the everyday gothic that indi-
cate the dynamics of hauntology.
In Chap. 3, the study moves into more established and well-known
gothic areas, namely foremost that of the vampire. Significantly, the vam-
pire is the haunted and the haunting. This paradoxical configuration
makes it a special and highly attractive gothic figure. It seems to exist
solely to transgress boundaries, since it in itself contains a transgression
and disturbance of the dichotomy man–animal. As stated by Benny
LeMaster: “Few literary figures possess the polymorphic resilience of the
vampire”.32 Following further on Derrida’s hauntology and animal phi-
losophy, we notice the trace of animality. In the act of pronouncing ‘man’
and in utilising the hegemonic privilege of naming the animals, we have
set the stage for vampirism. The trace of animality is that ancient echo of
bestiality that haunts the human. Extending Derrida’s proclivity for port-
manteaus, we can say that the vampire takes the shape of the manimal. In
order to study the temporal aspects of the hauntology at work within the
vampire genre, we have a closer look at four more or less canonised vam-
pire narratives. John Polidori’s The Vampyre functions as the historical
point of resonance for the contemporary works by Ajvide Lindqvist, Butler
and del Toro. What will be of central importance is the phenomenon that
Derrida calls limitrophy. According to Derrida, this is about “what sprouts
or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also
what feeds the limit, generates it, and complicates it”.33 Such limitrophy
will manifest itself differently in the works but also in thematically similar
ways. Hauntology as temporality within and around the figure of the vam-
pire will be pursued in these works. Another aspect clearly foregrounded
here, is the general gothic disregard of ‘high and low’ art distinctions.
Maybe it is actually in the field of cultural studies that the vampire fully
spreads its wings. But this notion does not in any way come into conflict
with the hauntological pursuit and its potential philosophical complexity.
This is partly so because the vampiric is a very rich and thought-provoking
gothic source of inspiration, and it contributes plenty of ideas to the topic
of hauntology. In Polidori, the mute animalism presents itself as a force
from a past without any determinable arche ̄, that is, any clear source-point.
Instead of being infected by a vampire bite, Aubrey is infected by the spell
of the vampire as the beckoning of the repressed animal as such. In Let the
Right One In, vampiric transgressions of the limit can be seen as a liberat-
ing force in relation to the theme of bullying. In terms of hauntology, the
curse of the past presents itself as an inescapable part of any present.
Fledgling treats cultural tradition as a form of haunting, both in its more
positive aspects in terms of family life, customs, the persistence of friend-
ship and fellow-feeling and its darker aspects as the historical power of
racist structures. Finally in Cronos, the guardian angels contain the vampir-
ism and animality that one would have thought was buried in the past.
These angels are supposed to guard the way back to Edenic innocence,
but instead they carry the animalistic inside them, which incarnates the
very transgression of a limit. The strength of the gothic comes to the fore
here, since it treats hauntology as frightening, but in the midst of that fear
and horror, it also possibly functions as a cathartic force.
Chapter 4 moves into the early developments of the gothic in a selec-
tion of works by Edgar Allan Poe, and thereby it deals with some tradi-
tional hauntological traits as for instance guilt and trauma. There are two
juxtaposable and yet intimately interrelated aspects of the Poesque
hauntology. One dimension is commonsensical and rather easily accessi-
ble, while the other is more subtle. The former makes manifest what func-
tions as guilt in individual characters, especially in several of Poe’s short
stories, while the latter displays a causeless hauntology that is part of
human cognition and affectivity as such. The more subtle hauntology is in
18 J. WRETHED
this chapter revealed through readings guided by a modified version of

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

of paradox, contradiction and skewed logics. James examines the impos-
sibilities of empirical science with an uncanny fictional precision (seem-
ingly introducing a slightly different form of empiricism).
In Chap. 6, the reader will be thrown into the maw of the Lovecraftian
hauntology. Lovecraft’s central hauntology is here understood as episte-
mological desire. Such a desire is distinct from the desire of needs. In
Lovecraft’s fiction, that which has become labelled as ‘weird’ is fully
dependent on the real of life as an embodied, perceptual necessity.
Lovecraft’s fiction contains a grotesquely hyperbolic version of phenome-
nological horizons, which I claim is the true horror of Lovecraft. The
nothingness and silence at the centre evoke their opposites in the logic of
hauntology’s ‘both-and’ that mainly replaces the ‘either-or’ of the Western
intellectual tradition. Through close readings of Lovecraft’s gothic tales
“The Lurking Fear”, “The Music of Erich Zann” and “The Haunter in
the Dark”, the chapter highlights the fundamental phenomena that build
up Lovecraft’s hauntological prose as a death-infused sermon, delivered by
a religious atheist. Epistemological desire intimates something like the ani-
mal’s attentiveness to ‘the Open’. This sphere of openness is a pre-objective
reality that the human never really reaches. But epistemological desire
points in that direction and humanity will always be haunted by its short-
comings and by its desire to break through to something beyond the
world of objectity. Lovecraft draws attention to these phenomena, both
on a macro and a micro stratum of givenness. At a quick glance, the quo-
tidian or ‘realistic’ setting of these short stories may easily be degraded to
the level of the prop, that is, it merely functions as a contrast to the fantas-
tical. However, it is actually in these parts of the narratives that the
hauntology is manifested in its most intriguing and perhaps horrifying
way. The xenophobia immanent to Lovecraft’s fiction is not pursued here,
but is seen as an openness within Lovecraft inspired re-writings and writ-
ing back. Hauntology situates itself on a philosophical level that clearly
verges on the theological, hence the vast recent interest in Lovecraft as a
theological provocateur. These dimensions are also touched upon in the
chapter, which without doubt invites further thinking along these lines.
Chapter 7 returns to Munro. This is done in order to further emphasise
the everyday gothic and thereby the larger forces of hauntology that in
certain ways overflow the gothic genre. It is also done to close a small
circle of literary history, in which hauntology is shown to be a major force
within heterogenous types of gothic fiction. In this chapter, we focus on a
20 J. WRETHED
specific gothic trope, namely that of male violence and the threat of male
violence. Munro has ways of utilising this particular aspect in relation to
hauntological patterns. As has been suggested by Wen-Shan Shieh, the
very form and structuring of Munro’s short story prose invites temporal
aspects that in turn of course have hauntological implications.
[…] Munro is a Gothic modernist who writes to defamiliarize, or to pro-

voke her readers to think differently about their life. To do so, she deploys
such narrative strategies as open-endedness of the plot, the splitting of the
self, and temporal prolepsis to defy normative expectations about the linear-
ity of the plot, the coherence and intelligibility of the self, and progressive
temporality to produce the uncanny reading effects in her everyday Gothic.34
To this outline, one may add the temporal hauntology and the haunting
power of life choices, especially all the roads not taken. In “Free Radicals”,
Munro hones in on the topics of absolute chance and absolute fate. Within
the cold shadow of male violence, we witness a complicated network of
hauntings that have made this situation possible. The male intruder
appears in the protagonist’s house as a consequence of two related haunt-
ings. He is haunted by the guilt of his recent murder of the rest of his close
family. That event was provoked by a larger haunting imposed upon him
by the family and the demand that he take care of his mentally ill sister
whom he abhors. The solution to the deadlock and seemingly dangerous
situation is found in the power of narratives or narrativity. In all of these
short stories, the temporality of narrativity is ubiquitously involved and it
haunts our thinking about temporality and sequences of events in our own
lives, and the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, which is part
of a more general mutual haunting between ‘fiction’ and ‘real life’. If we
return to Kierkegaard, we realise that Munro’s fiction is saturated with a
thorough investigation of the strange temporality and phenomenology of
a life as lived, and that analysis necessarily contains hauntological dimen-
sions. In “Runaway” and “Passion” similar patterns are cognised also
partly in the shadow of the gothic threat of male violence. Especially in
“Passion”, we have a hauntological setup, since the protagonist is involved
in making sense of her life by returning to the life-changing event that has
haunted her and compelled her to re-read (that is, re-narrate) her own
narrative, which essentially is her life in the form of a hauntological maze.
* * *
As mentioned above, this study pursues hauntology as a strong feature

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

reader being forced to confront the haunting aspects of her own life. The
other inevitable consequence is that human life and experience is haunted
at its very root. It is haunted by the realisation of the unrealisable, which
is also clearly mirrored in the numerous open endings in Munro’s short
story works. Fiction can be a consolation, a power or even catharsis, but it
may also be as disturbing as the gothic genre has always sensed it to be, in
terms of the haunting of a fundamental unknowing. The epistemological
desire, which Barbaras outlines, pushes the human towards the Open
(objectless phenomenality) by immediately closing it. The closing then
gives rise to renewed epistemological desire. There is always more to see,
infinitely new aspects of seeing the same thing even. The slightly different
approaches in the chapters to come draw attention to this phenomenon.
Different ways of thinking limitrophy in relation to hauntology open up
numerous manners of re-thinking anthropocentrism that mirror promi-
nent contemporary philosophical concerns. What remains of humanity is
perhaps not much more than ecological guilt and angst over its caged and
mutilated animality.
Notes
1. “The literary and fictional background to the Gothic revival is clearly mani-
fested as an artificial or fabricated aesthetic phenomenon”, Fred Botting,
“In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture”, A New Companion to
the Gothic, David Punter (ed.) (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated,
2012), 13–24, 14.
2. The full quote in English from Kierkegaard: “Philosophy is perfectly right
in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the
other clause—that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through
this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes
properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get
perfect repose to take a stance—backward”. The Essential Kierkegaard,
Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (eds.) (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 12.
3. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe developed the two genres in parallel. “The
Tell-Tale Heart” (horror gothic) and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
(detective fiction) were both written in the same year, 1843. They both
contain murders (crimes) and the police (protection against crime); the
difference is just in the emphasis and focalisation. The focus is on the hor-
ror and guilt of any atrocious deed or the focus is on the ratiocination that
leads to the solving of a mystery.
4. Merlin Coverley makes a rough division: first wave, Walpole, Shelley,
Maturin; second wave, the Victorian, Stevenson, Wilde, Wells, Stoker;
third wave, the horror boom of the 70s (Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past
(Harpenden UK: Oldcastle Books, 2020), 60). C.f. also Clive Bloom,
“From Horace Walpole to the Divine Marquis de Sade”, Bloom, C. (ed.),
The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.,
2021), 1–20, 2.
5. Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past, 81.
6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, & the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994 [French
edition 1993]).
7. James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict,
1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
8. For overviews, c.f. collections such as Casper, Monica, and Eric Wertheimer,
(eds). Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict and
Memory in Everyday Life (New York, USA: New York University Press,
2016); Philippe Ortell, Mark Turin, and Margot Young (eds), Memory
(Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, 2018).
9. C.f. Michael Peter Schofield: “[H]auntology remains a fairly opaque
umbrella term […], which lacks precise definition or simple application”
(“Re-Animating Ghosts: Materiality and Memory in Hauntological
Appropriation” (International Journal of Film and Media Arts, 4:2, 2019,
24–37), 25). The difficulty of “application” goes hand in hand with its
deconstructive pedigree, and this may be utilised as a strength in analytic
readings.
10. Throughout this study I will use the concepts of ‘affect’ and ‘affectivity’.
To clarify, the underlying theory is the phenomenology of Michel Henry.
This can for the purposes here be kept on a rather simple level. Henry
introduces the concept of auto-affectivity as the root of life. Feeling feels
feeling is a prerequisite for the feeling and perception of objects. This
notion can smoothly be combined with Edmund Husserl’s basic concept
of intentionality, which means that acts of consciousness are directed
towards objects. In the act of feeling there is something felt. These two
basic phenomenological principles are fully compatible. Auto-affectivity
just has the feeling itself as its own object. This can be explained by emo-
tional phenomena such as a mood. Both auto-affectivity and intentionality
are essential in order to analyse hauntological phenomena. Henry sums up
the same thing as I have explained: “[I]mpressionality is pure phenomenal-
ity as such, the matter and the phenomenological substance from which
consciousness is made and thus the original phenomenality of all phenom-
24 J. WRETHED
ena. This is why every objectivity, even the most transcendent one, is
clothed with an affective predicative layer that is constituted by a specific
intentionality, and ‘act of feeling’” (Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 23).
11. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Anchor Books, 1998).
12. “Preventing the Bocksten Man From Becoming a Ghost” (Hallands
Kulturhistoriska Museum—museumhalland.se), accessed 230220. This
whole phenomenon breathes hauntology: “Many of [the bog] people were
sacrificed to higher powers. Some of the best known have been found in
Denmark. The Grauballe Man at Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, and The
Tollund Man at Silkeborg Museum. The Bocksten Man is unusual, as he is
one of the few bog people from Christian times, when in fact people were
not sacrificed in bogs. However, belief in the power of the bog remained
strong for hundreds of years, and perhaps that was why the location was
chosen. One thing The Bocksten Man has in common with the other bog
finds is the unique opportunity they provide us to come close to people
from the past and step into the world as they saw it” (museumhalland.se).
13. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act III, Sc. IV, The Arden Shakespeare
(Walton-on-Thames Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1997), 94–95.
14. Edgar Allan Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, G. R. Thompson
(ed) (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 320.
15. C.f. for instance, the very thorough outline of the concept in Nicholas
Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
16. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London, Penguin Books, 2003), 148.
17. Ibid., 156.
18. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny
and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 5.
19. Royle, The Uncanny, 24.
20. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” (The National Interest 16, 1989):
3–18. The book: The End of History and the Last Man, 20th anniversary
(ed) (London: Penguin Books, 2012 [1992]).
21. Derrida, Specters, 39–40.
22. Ibid., 10.
23. The conceptual complexity that can be traced in the intersections between
Heidegger, Freud and Derrida does not necessarily have to be pursued
here. Especially because this complexity can also be further problematised
since four languages are involved, ancient Greek, German, French and
English. This translation complexity can be studied in an article by David
Meagher, but I prefer to cite his conclusion on Derrida’s original contribu-
tion that more zooms in on the ‘function’ of the spectre, in Derrida’s
thinking about Marxism, but also more generally: “The spectre that haunts
Europe in 1847–48, das Gespenst des Communismus, is the manifestation of
material processes, historical conditions, and actual relations of produc-

tion. And (perhaps) the eighteen–day takeover of Tahrir Square from
January to February 2011 can be read as its contemporary expression. As
its spectre loomed, the societies that formed in those squares, on those
revolutionary days and nights, can be read as the carnal form of a spirit or
idea of communism. This is the contradiction (beyond Derrida’s concern
with the secrecy of the communist movement) which produces the ‘intel-
lectual uncertainty’ (intellectuellen Unsicherheit), the uncanniness and fear
of Marx’s legendary incipit. The spectre, when it looms, no longer warns
of or promises, but represents a past which returns, is immanent or virtu-
ally arrived. It is a brazen threat to conservative forces and a messianic hope
to progressive forces” (“The Uncanniness of Spectrality” (Mosaic: A
Journal For the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 44:4, 2011, 177–93),
189). This is a relevant simplification, since the return of the past itself, in
whichever form, is central in any outline of hauntology. It applies to a situ-
ation of macro-politics, as here, but it also applies to a life as lived in any
godforsaken domestic milieu anywhere in the world.
24. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and
Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 6.
25. Ibid., 22.
26. C.f. for instance the arguments of Elisabeth M. Loevlie, “Faith in the
Ghosts of Literature: Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and
Morrison’s Beloved” (Religions. 4:3, 2013), 336–350.
27. Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past, 205.
28. Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century
English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, 2018), 7.
29. Sadeq Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan,
Springer Nature, 2021), 3.
30. Ibid., 69.
31. Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips (London: Virago Press, 2014), 143.
32. Benny LeMaster, “Queer Imag(in)ing: Liminality as Resistance in
Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In” (Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies, 8:2, 2011), 103–123, 103.
33. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 29.
34. Wen-Shan Shieh, “The Uncanny, Open Secrets, and Katherine Mansfield’s
Modernist Legacy in Alice Munro’s Everyday Gothic” (Tamkang Review,
48:1, 2017), 47–68, 51.
35. Renaud Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2021), 348.
CHAPTER 2
“Penelope Was Not a Phantom”: Everyday

Hauntology in Alice Munro and Margaret
Atwood
Alice Munro, “Chance”, “Soon”, “Silence”

Alice Munro is firmly anchored in the tradition that has come to be labelled
Canadian gothic or Southern Ontario gothic. If one zooms in even more
closely, it could be said that the Canadian gothic is one of survival, not
only in the wilderness of Canadian landscapes, but also quite plainly in the
experiential concentration of the domestic sphere. Katrin Berndt’s defini-
tion suits my point of departure very well: “I define the Gothic mode as
addressing the indeterminate, obscure, and subconscious spheres of life. It
stresses the hidden, ambivalent meanings, expresses fears beyond logic and
rational understanding, and reminds its readers that such anxieties may
lurk beneath the surface of everyday, ordinary experience”.1 This mode
may just as well be called ‘everyday gothic’, since the manner of its appear-
ance is more on the level of the uncanny or of a certain affective mood that
may be difficult to pin down.2 However, in addition to these definitions,
we shall look more specifically at the temporal spectrality that is central in
Derridean hauntology. Munro’s short story “Chance” (2004) starts at a
point in time where a substantial part of its back-story has already hap-
pened.3 The protagonist receives a letter from a man she met on a train
journey six months earlier. He sends an open invitation, exploring the
possibility of them meeting again. Then a few pages into the narrative, we
are back on the train journey earlier in the story sequence. The part-time
teacher and PhD student Juliet sits in the train trying to read. She is
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_2
28 J. WRETHED
disturbed by a man who apparently is seeking company. It is clear to Juliet

that he does not make a pass on her, but that he probably is just lonely, in
search of some kind of casual companionship or fellow feeling. Juliet does
not want company at that particular time and at the stranger’s use of the
word “chum”, when he suggests that “we could just sort of chum around
together”, she freezes up emotionally and eventually moves to the obser-
vation car to be able to read.4 This is a small everyday incident out of other
small incidents and choices being made in any life. Such forkings of life
paths can of course be magnified in fiction. A familiar popular example
would be Peter Howitt’s film Sliding Doors (1998), which is a narrative
seemingly inspired by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1982 film
Blind Chance, in which three scenarios are dealt with. The German thriller
Run Lola Run (1998) is also inspired by Kiéslowski’s film. All three films
involve trains, which will be of some significance for the following analysis.
The Polish film was named Przypadek, which is a word that appears in the
lists of meanings for several English words, such as ‘case’, ‘accident’,
‘chance’, ‘instance’ and ‘event’. Blind Chance is maybe an acceptable
translation, but there seems to be something missing. Perchance is the
more haunting and temporal connotations.
Already here it becomes clear that this aspect of life sequences has an
enormous philosophical power and importance, especially on the philoso-
phy of time and its relation to spectrality. Thinking about all possible out-
comes of just an hour in a person’s life would be unbearable. If any chosen
point can potentially spread out in two or three or even a larger number
of scenarios, human cognition cannot even handle it, which is a phenom-
enon referred to as the multiverse conundrum.5 This is probably why this
type of thinking most often sticks to two possible worlds, as in Sliding
Doors. Most certainly, it is only heightened dramatic outcomes that nor-
mally elicit such thinking, and that assessment would go for both fiction
and what we call ‘real life’. That is partly the case in Munro’s “Chance”.
Later, the train stops for a short while at a station in the wilderness. Shortly
after that, the train stops again after having hit some kind of obstacle. It
gradually becomes clear to Juliet that it is the man who tried to strike up a
conversation with her that has committed suicide by letting himself be hit
by the train.
The spectrality is here initially mainly affective. What effect did Juliet’s
rejection of the man have? Was that the final drop in his obviously unhappy
life? For Juliet, the feelings begin to haunt her. Derrida’s portmanteau
hauntology comes to the fore. The mute “H” in French makes the word
2 “PENELOPE WAS NOT A PHANTOM”: EVERYDAY HAUNTOLOGY IN ALICE… 29
phonetically come out as “Ontology”. The ghostly “H” then haunts

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

Typically, blood and other body fluids are culturally charged, since they
transgress a seemingly stable boundary line. Where does the body end and
where does the world begin? Where do I end and where do other people
begin? Those seem to be the ontological questions. Blood itself blurs a
distinction; it carries the transgression within itself. This is disturbing. For
Juliet the whole situation becomes even worse when she gradually realises
that it must have been the man she earlier “snubbed” that had been hit by
the train.7 When Juliet overhears passengers speak about the suicide some-
one uses the phrase “Full of blood”, which of course also begins to haunt
her.8 As being of the same substance that already haunts her in the shape
of her menstrual blood, it augments the overall sense of haunting. On the
personal life-level of the protagonist, such seemingly irrational patterns of
affects and cognition dominate being at this specific time, and arguably
similar phenomena govern being in any life at any given point. This is the
everyday gothic. It is a subterranean life-world, which is as gothic as any
network of hidden doors, cellars and dungeons.9 “Full of blood. That was
disgusting…”, Juliet exclaims to herself.10 The pertinent hauntological
question that the text seems to ask is: Was the past already pregnant with
30 J. WRETHED
the man’s suicide or did Juliet in fact cause it by her rejection of this man
in distress? This draws our attention to yet another aspect of hauntology,
which is the pervasive unknowing. The setting of the train accentuates the
overall paradoxical ontology of time and events. The rails are fixed, yet it
seems as if they are fixed only in hindsight, when the outcome can be
assessed. But what if? What if the rails forward are also set, even though
humans habitually live in the illusion that we have a free will and that we
can at least to some extent control what will happen or what we will allow
to happen.11
The gradual changes that appear in the narrative are draped in a fatalis-
tic and unmerciful affectivity, but which paradoxically also allows for
change and difference. Not only does the world change, but Juliet’s inter-
pretative point of view is always in flux too:
She tried looking out the window, but the scene, composed of the same ele-
ments, had changed. Less than a hundred miles on, it seemed as if there was
a warmer climate. The lakes were fringed with ice, not covered. The black
water, black rocks, under the wintry clouds, filled the air with darkness.12
The “same elements” have “changed”. It is impossible even for Juliet to

tell where her affective state ends and the atmosphere begins. The line of
demarcation is not fixed. Hauntology is at work. When attempting to read
her book on ancient Greek myth and philosophy—which is actually a re-
reading, so she sees her earlier notes and underlinings—she discovers “that
what she had pounced on with such satisfaction at one time now seemed
obscure and unsettling”.13 Her attention is drawn to the perspective of the
dead, which certainly has been altered by her recent shocking experience.
Then another, perhaps seemingly insignificant, boundary transgression
occurs when she falls asleep and the narrative almost seamlessly moves into
her dream.
The book slipped out of her hands, her eyes closed, and she was now walk-
ing with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each
of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully
even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the
name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentame-
ter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realised
her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situa-
tion, but she could not grasp it.14
The five-sided patterns are visualisations of the five pairs of syllables in the
regularity of the pentameter. However, presumably the students want the
name of the geometrical figure, which would be a ‘pentagon’. This is an
example of the everyday gothic at its absolutely highest point of subtlety.
There is the transgression of worlds that are made manifest with different
logical structures. However, the link to the phonology corresponding to a
spatial reality again highlights Derrida’s philosophy. Logos must be
upheld, otherwise the ice breaks and chaos and insanity presumably ensue.
But the world cannot be “beautifully even”; speech does not normally
come out as iambic pentameter. The perfect word is lacking. The image of
perfection is also what simultaneously becomes the dangerous crack. The
gothic as a challenge to the flawless ice is the mute “H” haunting the sense
of a rational ontology. For Juliet, the rather small incident and the bigger
incident that follows change the fundamental components of her whole
being. Even though no one would sensibly hold her responsible for the
man’s death, the whole thing haunts her in the proper sense of that word.
The other passenger that Juliet has met, Eric, that she later builds up a
relation with and has a child with, tries to console her: “‘What I think
is—,’ he said. ‘I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life—
things will probably happen in your life—that will make this thing seem
minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about’”.15 However much
the reader, and presumably Juliet, wants to believe Eric’s words, they ring
somewhat hollow. All in all, this event makes manifest the gothic obsession
with the terrible beauty of life. Also, the illusion of the clear-cut distinc-
tions of scales comes to the fore. The horror actually consists of the jum-
bled space where distinctions of large scale and small scale do not seem to
work according to an established logic.
Munro’s everyday gothic pursues the logic or anti-logic or (anti)logic
of the unfolding of a life even further. In the collection Runaway, Juliet’s
life continues in the immediately following short stories “Soon” and
“Silence”. The incident on the train journey in the sixties—which led to
her having a relation and a child with Eric, and that also gave birth to the
spectre of the man who killed himself—will eventually have a heightened
significance. The disappearance of the man that at least for a while haunts
Juliet on a conscious level is later accentuated by two other disappear-
ances. Eric is a fisherman and vanishes in a storm and is later found
drowned. The daughter Penelope suddenly disappears to go and live her
own life in what seems to have been some form of life crisis. As far as we
32 J. WRETHED
readers know, she seems to have the intention never again to have any
contact with Juliet.
The everyday gothic, with its inherent hauntology, is as skilfully imple-
mented as it is cruel and merciless. The uncanny ending draws attention
to the overall haunting and the component of utter unknowing. Juliet
would most probably not have met Eric if the suicidal man had not dis-
turbed her reading, since that is what makes her go to the observation car
where she meets Eric. It is also the death of this unknown man that makes
Juliet want to speak further with Eric on the train. The absence of the
dead man does not explicitly haunt her throughout the subsequent short
stories, but it seems to do so anyway in hindsight towards the end of the
narrative. Penelope’s absence eventually becomes a melancholy presence.
Juliet contemplates her relation to her then-partner Gary, but Penelope is
there haunting her whole being. Juliet has just, almost by accident, been
reached by the information that Penelope is well and by that point she is
also the mother of five children.
At dinner, she thought that the news she had just absorbed put her in a bet-
ter situation for marrying Gary, or living with him—whatever it was he
wanted. There was nothing to worry about, or hold herself in wait for, con-
cerning Penelope. Penelope was not a phantom, she was safe, as far as any-
body is safe, and she was probably as happy as anybody is happy. She had
detached herself from Juliet and very likely from the memory of Juliet, and
Juliet could not do better than to detach herself in turn.16
In our hauntological context, the phrase “Penelope was not a phantom”

of course reads as an exorcism that immediately metamorphoses into an
evocation or a conjuration. The spectre of Penelope can precisely not be
nailed down. It cannot be eliminated. Juliet’s absorption into her thoughts
about this ghost also has concrete consequences: “If Gary saw that she was
agitated he pretended not to notice. But it was probably on this evening
that they both understood they would never be together”.17 It is not par-
ticularly farfetched to see the loneliness of the man who committed suicide
in the sixties spreading like a virus. In perfect alignment with the gothic
stamp of utter unknowing, this contemporary narrative draws attention to
a subterranean temporality in which spectres travel in their own non-
Aristotelian logic and non-Euclidean space. The last story “Silence” ends
in the following way:
She keeps hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way.
She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spon-
taneous remissions, things of that sort.18
The rather melancholy outcome of this trilogy of short stories is that we

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

In Margaret Atwood’s 1991 collection of short stories Wilderness Tips,
there is a narrative called “Death by Landscape”. Early on in the story,
attention is drawn towards the landscape painting of the Canadian group
of painters referred to as The Group of Seven. The protagonist Lois will
eventually think back on a childhood experience, which is the main narra-
tive. But in the beginning, she is contemplating these landscape paintings:
But this [as investments] is not why she bought the pictures, way back then.
She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was
in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not
34 J. WRETHED
peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her
with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or
even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.19
The somewhat astonishing declaration here is that Lois desires something

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

fragments of skin yet again draws our attention towards the abject and the
uncanny attraction-repulsion of liminality. Where does Lucy end and
where does the world begin?
The summer camp goes out together on a longer excursion in the wil-
derness. When they paddle off in their canoes, “Lois can feel the water
stretching out, with the shores twisting away on either side, immense and
a little frightening”.23 The enormity and slightly scary dimension of the
experience conjures the sense of the uncanny, which also seems to be pres-
ent when Lois contemplates her landscape paintings much later in life, but
earlier in the narrative structure. That little detail is decisive in our haunto-
logical reading. Again, affectively, time is out of joint. Gradually, Lois
becomes partly absorbed by the uncanny depth of the lake and presumably
the sense of deep-time permeating the wilderness: “Lois feels as if an invis-
ible rope has broken. They’re floating free, on their own, cut loose.
Beneath the canoe the lake goes down, deeper and colder than it was a
minute before”.24 Further on in the journey they leave “V-shaped trails
behind them”.25 These subtle inscriptions on the body and on the land-
scape will become much more significant towards the end of the narrative.
At one point, they go ashore for lunch and Lucy and Lois go a little way
off on their own. Lucy needs to urinate and does that in privacy out of
sight, but then a short scream is suddenly heard and Lucy disappears with-
out a trace. Lois’s perception of what happens is revealed in an analepsis
filled with hesitation and ambiguity.
She has gone over and over it in her mind since, so many times that the first
real shout has been obliterated, like a footprint trampled by other footprints.
But she is sure (she is almost positive, she is nearly certain) that it was not a
shout of fear. Not a scream. More like a cry of surprise, cut off too soon.
Short, like a dog’s bark.26
Inscriptions are often our only connection with the past, the only way we
seem to be able to lift things out of the merciless stream, in order to scru-
tinise and preserve. Still, these inscriptions too are very fragile and tempo-
rary in relation to deep-time. For Lois, the disappearance of Lucy merges
with her sublime experience of the wilderness that uncannily does not
seem to need humans at all. Humanity and human presence are just an
extremely minor parenthesis in the vastness of the universe. Earlier the
seemingly bottomless lake was revealed, and a little later, Lois experiences
36 J. WRETHED
the sky: “There was a moon, and a movement of the trees. In the sky there
were stars, layers of stars that went down and down”.27 After Lucy’s disap-
pearance, she of course becomes a spectre in Lois’s life through her pal-
pable absence that stretches through the decades.
Hauntology is here very clearly revealed. Lois explicitly articulates the
trauma from a position much later in her life, when otherwise strongly
significant life experiences fade like very old handwriting:
She can hardly remember, now, having her two boys in the hospital, nursing
them as babies; she can hardly remember getting married, or what Rob
looked like. Even at the time she never felt she was paying full attention. She
was tired a lot, as if she was living not one life but two: her own, and another,
shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized—
the life that would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and
disappeared from time.28
Here the spectrality clearly indicates a doubling, a temporality out of joint.

The ghost that will not be put to rest has brought with it something of the
terrible weight of existence. The lack of logical inscription transfers the
power into fiction, which in the narrative is made manifest by the land-
scape paintings. The uncanny energy of Lucy’s ghost erupts in the paint-
ings. It erupts as absence:
She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a pic-
ture of Lucy. You can’t see her exactly, but she’s there, in behind the pink
stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff she is hidden
by the clutch of fallen rocks towards the bottom, in the one of the river
shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe. In the yellow autumn
woods she’s behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees,
over beside the blue sliver of pond; but if you walked into the picture and
found the tree, it would be the wrong one, because the right one would be
further on.29
Fiction is yet another version of reality, or vice versa, the haunting is obvi-
ously mutual. It prolongs the deferral of closure. Hauntology is accentu-
ated in Atwood in a similar way that it is in Munro. By beginning and
ending the narrative in the temporal sphere of Lois’s later life and by
incorporating the landscape paintings, the sense of Lucy’s absence being
timeless is achieved. Spectrality is as omnipotent as the gothic trope of
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Gothic Hauntology: Everyday Hauntings

The study pursues the phenomenon of hauntology within the gothic

and the paradox of absolute indeterminacy seems to constitute the only

Bibliography Gothic Hauntology157

Joakim Wrethed has hitherto mainly worked in Irish Studies—especially

Introduction: “Avaunt! And Quit My Sight!

Hauntology could be said to constitute the bedrock foundation of the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Hauntology, it would seem, has expanded its remit to bring everything it

However, generally speaking, a too vastly “expanded […] remit” of the

individuals through cultural practice. Branches of Christianity have guilt as

To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do

The act of haunting is effective because it displaces us in those places we feel

lich, meaning literally ‘unhomely’. For Freud that which is unhomely

Another name for uncanny overflow might be deconstruction.

There are two major consequences of such a re-conceptualisation of

Recent Hauntology Studies

It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by the

Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing

Fisher is obviously analysing hauntology in larger movements of cultural

In the case of hauntology, nothing is more illustrative of the border between

psychoanalysis at bay. What is especially noteworthy for this study, in

This is basically what we witness, for instance, when we engage with

Outline of the Chapters

large-­scale phenomenon, but when Munro stages a broken-off conversa-

this chapter revealed through readings guided by a modified version of

empirically rational modus operandi. Hauntology is the study of these areas

[…] Munro is a Gothic modernist who writes to defamiliarize, or to pro-

As mentioned above, this study pursues hauntology as a strong feature

fiction involving hauntology conjures more hauntology in the sense of the

material processes, historical conditions, and actual relations of produc-

“Penelope Was Not a Phantom”: Everyday

Alice Munro, “Chance”, “Soon”, “Silence”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

disturbed by a man who apparently is seeking company. It is clear to Juliet

phonetically come out as “Ontology”. The ghostly “H” then haunts

Eventually, hearing people on the outside she decides not to flush.

The “same elements” have “changed”. It is impossible even for Juliet to

In our hauntological context, the phrase “Penelope was not a phantom”

The rather melancholy outcome of this trilogy of short stories is that we

Margaret Atwood, “Death by Landscape”

The somewhat astonishing declaration here is that Lois desires something

is the case in Atwood’s narrative. Moreover, the strong physicality of the

Here the spectrality clearly indicates a doubling, a temporality out of joint.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

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Bibliography Gothic Hauntology157

large-scale phenomenon, but when Munro stages a broken-off conversa-