Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing by Jodey Castricano (review)

356 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 practice that one does not transliterate names of authors from those countries which use the Latin alphabet, but sometimes one may add in brackets their phonetic pronunciation. Many Russian names that should be transliterated are transliterated incorrectly too. For this sort of neglect the publisher must be held to blame. Gottlieb has interesting things to say and it was worth taking a little time and effort to avoid these errors. In spite of these shortcomings, I would recommend Gottlieb=s study to anyone who is interested in the subject. However, in conclusion I would also like to ask if a different approach to dystopia should be taken in the future. Instead of analysing dystopian fiction along the dividing line of East and West, I would suggest making an attempt to establish a typology of dystopia, regardless of whether it comes from the East or West. I wonder whether such a measure might prompt a more adequate understanding of dystopia which would help to overcome old stereotypes. (EDWARD MOZEJKO) Jodey Castricano. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida=s Ghost Writing McGill-Queen=s University Press. x, 166. $65.00 Perhaps the name of Jacques Derrida ought to be added to the everexpanding Gothic literary and critical canon. Though it is not the explicit aim of Cryptomimesis to effect such a canonization, the book certainly succeeds in drawing out the Gothic aspects of his project. Exploring the >increasing frequency= with which notions of living death, revenance, haunting, phantoms, spectres and crypts have appeared in Derrida=s writings, the book advances the idea of >cryptomimesis= (>a writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions, generates uncanny effects=) to conjoin deconstruction and the literature of terror in an obscurely productive textual space. Suffused with Gothic images and tropes, deconstruction opens a labyrinthine literary hollow within philosophy; ever attentive to the textual surfaces and performative effects of its writing, Gothic figures enact the darkly playful interrogation of the phonocentric securities of language. Do not read Cryptomimesis with the expectation of clarity and illumination . Like the Gothic tradition which thrives in the shadows of Enlightenment attitudes, the book probes the metaphors of tomb, grave, and crypt to show an entanglement of and in writing. Its project is not the cryptography of decoders, transposing a set of ciphers into readable signs: deciphering, as Roland Barthes observed of the text, is ousted in favour of analysis or unravelling, turning the threads of writing into reading. Cryptomimesis, to a large extent, is defined by such a textually self-conscious approach. It >invites interminable analysis in that it is a kind of writing that is selfxxxxxxxx humanities 357 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 referential yet co-exists in a relation of correspondence with other writing.= It >is,= moreover, >a dream of language that produces an uncanny topography =; >is, in short, a burial practice that, like incorporation, preserves desire, keeping it alive in a complex architecture.= Such definitive statements return to the maze of language where the enunciation of the text performs the cryptomimesis it describes, generating its own >crypt effect=: >the vertigo that comes about from the multiple displacements in language=; the >continuous displacement in which the vacillating undecidability of one=s position contributes to a reading and writing of the text of the other.= Throughout, the attention to wordplay and nuances of signification in both Derridean and Gothic writing highlights the shifting sands of meaning and the dark disturbances of identity: >To be caught up in the delirium of cryptomimesis is to participate in the ebbs, flows, currents, and undertows of its seachanges : the always-already pluridimensional condition of différance in language.= The >delirium= Cryptomimesis identifies in part describes its evident enthusiasm for writing in general, its relish for the différances that upset borders and render meanings plural. Its method, as a result, is neither scholarly, in a traditional literary sense, nor deconstructive. The frame of reference to Gothic works and criticism is quite limited: Poe, King, Romero are its principal texts, and discussion of them is sporadic, even fleeting. In contrast, an impressive range of...