Autospectrography: On Henry James's The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

Autospectrography:On Henry James's The Turn of the Screw Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. —Joseph Conrad1 And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. —Wallace Stevens2 If testimony [. . .] became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. —Jacques Derrida3 Writing about one's past, which is what autobiography is about, has to do with the summoning of specters. Still, if autobiography is haunted, it also haunts its readers and interpreters, who are enthralled but also burdened by the furtive glimpse they are allowed into the other's darkness. Like Douglas, one of Henry James's narrators in The Turn of the Screw, the literary scholar might well ask, If autobiography as ghost story gives the readerly effect another turn of the screw, what do you say an autobiography about ghosts themselves will do?4 Since I am concerned here with the relationship of autobiography to spectrality, I take James's celebrated ghost story as a case in point. [End Page 1] In her seminal essay "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Shoshana Felman observes that The Turn of the Screw could be read "not only as a remarkable ghost story but also as a no less remarkable detective story," the story of "a singularly redoubtable crime: the murder of a child" (175, original italics).5 To these two forms then I add autobiography, particularly the autobiographical memoir, since the novella's main plot allegorizes the autobiographical process in the first-person chronicle of a young woman's experience as a governess in a haunted house. In terms of the tale's critical history, it is interesting to observe that attempts to liberate it from the traditional polemic between the apparitionists (those insisting on the reality of the ghosts) and the hallucinationists (those pathologizing the governess—notably, Edmund Wilson) have often involved a rethinking of its generic structure. Thus, several years before the 1977 publication of Felman's essay in Yale French Studies, which used Lacanian analysis to turn from the hitherto thematic interpretations of the tale to questions about its language structure, Susan Crowl's 1971 reading attempted to reconcile the opposed camps by focusing on the reliability of the governess's first-person narrative. For Crowl, this narrative reveals a truth that is not necessarily empirical, but whose lack of empirical verifiability is not transparently self-incriminating: insofar as the governess sees the ghosts, they are real, but her susceptibility—rather than equaling madness—can be viewed as a figure through which James links inner experience to the social expectations that are brought to bear on the character's construction. The governess's unreliability serves as a stylistic marker of James's psychological realism. Although Crowl's reading still operates within the boundaries of a form/content distinction, it does shift the ground of the discussion by acknowledging the confessional mode of the text. Crowl writes: I have tried to sketch some of the implications and applications of reading "The Turn of the Screw" as allegory—or, more precisely, as about allegory. We may read it, I propose, either as allegory about the way in which the intensities of experience felt as deeply private are also a social gesture, or as aesthetic allegory about another kind of publication of private vision. The governess is a figure both for social effects and for stylistic purposes. Bly and the events of the governess's stay there are turned into concrete and spatial metaphors in the process of the personal confession she undergoes. (114-115, my italics) Crowl's essay does not mention autobiography, but to the extent that she considers the governess's madness a symptom of a psycho-social gap, an "imbalance between the envisioning self and the environing world" (121...