Suspense Novel

Abstract

The figural ontology that authorises the Jamesian novel is constituted in a specular turn erecting before the subject, as in a mirror, an image of its original—or rather pre-original—dispossession, itself constituted by the faculty of language. Man doesn't possess language like a property; language, on the contrary, dispossesses him of himself. Mimesis, or, more precisely, the mimetic or specular turn which constitutes the principle of James's writing converts this intimate dispossession into a figure of the other apprehended (or misapprehended) by the subject as an alienated figure of the self. While the specular image provides the foundation for the Jamesian centre of consciousness (reflector) and a more or less conventional, if highly speculative, narrative structure, the spectral image places the mimetic turn in suspense, rendering visible the turn itself and reflecting without sufficient difference an image of the subject's originary dispossession. The speculative movement of the narrative itself being thereby suspended— in 'The Turn of the Screw'—the subject of writing is delivered over to the pure repetition of the mimetic turn: the uncanny—Unheimlichkeit—itself. In 'The Jolly Corner,' however, while the speculative dynamic of the narrative achieves itself in typical, if particularly apocalyptic, fashion, the figural ontology of the subject is dislocated at its foundation by a moment of suspension giving way to the 'supreme' value, or truth, of the novel as a work of art.