De]Composing ghosts: The failure of truth and the truth of failure from James to Oates

Abstract

In the prologue to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the frame narrator explicitly warns his audience that the ghost story to follow will not reveal any of its mysteries, at least, ‘not in any literal vulgar way’. The novella itself famously withholds any final explanation of its ambiguous ghosts, which has in part led to Joyce Carol Oates’s re telling of the tale in her ‘Accursed inhabitants of the house of Bly’ (1994). Though accused of simplistically making the inexplicit explicit, her tale complexly investigates the limits of the search for truth, and demonstrates that while a delivery of all of the dead letters of the original ostensibly recomposes James’s narrative holes, it also simultaneously decomposes the original, asking far more questions than it answers. Drawing from Alain Badiou’s concept both of the void that represents invisible nothingness and of the ‘phantom remainder’ that unhinges the thesis of stable knowledge and suggests the inaccessibility of the truth of being, this article will explore the ways in which the treatment of ghostliness exposes the intricate haunting in the relationship between a revision and its original, between a narrative and the event it narrates, and between knowledge and the truth that exceeds it. In applying Badiou’s Being and Event to an investigation of how James’s and Oates’s tales compose, decompose and recompose narrative structures in order to articulate an event, it will become clear that the narrative act paradoxically both induces and exorcises the haunting void, and as such, provides the means of negotiating the irretrievable loss of the truth of being.