Reading for Phantoms

The Gothic, whether considered as a fairly stable literary genre or as an unpredictable impulse surfacing in a variety of texts, has always provided fertile soil for the work of literary and psychoanalytic theorists. The defining features of the Gothic - its strangeness, its mockery of perspective, its obsessive questioning of symbolic orders - gesture towards the darker purposes of literature more generally: the failures that are somehow intrinsic to all representation, and which play upon the human mind's own capacity to adjust to loss or trauma. The work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, which provides much of the theoretical basis for Christine Berthin's Gothic Hauntings, is itself grounded in a vocabulary of crypts and phantoms, using these staple Gothic motifs to describe complex processes of repression and traumatic inheritance (The Wolf Man's Magic Word, 1986; assorted essays translated and collected in The Shell and the Kernel, 1994). Berthin takes her cue from such language, re-examining landmark Gothic fictions to reveal the textual equivalents of Abraham and Torok's psychological mechanisms. In doing so, she builds upon the work of Esther Rashkin (Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 1992), one of the first to propose new methods of reading and new ideas of readability based upon Abraham and Torok's reconstitution of unspoken secrets.

At the heart of Berthin's study are the two concepts introduced in her subtitle. The crypt, as described by Abraham and Torok, is a hidden, locked space within the subject's ego. Distinct from the Unconscious, it allows for a sort of 'preservative repression', the embalming of a secret idea, which becomes detectable only by its influence on language, its creation of magic words or 'cryptonyms' in the subject's vocabulary. The ghost or phantom has often been seen as a discrete phenomenon, independent of the crypt's formation, though at various points in Berthin's work the dividing line between the two ideas is blurred somewhat. The phantom is a repression that is not the subject's own, but is inherited, through the gaps and faults of a parent's language, during infancy. It is a guilty secret, or, in Gothic styling, an ancestral vice, which is by necessity not understood and not spoken by the inheriting subject, though its presence might be felt in peculiarities of the subject's language choices and behaviour.

The archetypal demonstration of a textual phantom in action was delivered by Abraham in his 1975 study of Shakespeare's Hamlet, an article usefully recounted by Berthin here. Abraham's Prince of Denmark is not simply the victim of an Oedipus complex. His hesitations and prevarications stem not from any traumatic experience of his own, but from the unknown knowledge that his father and Polonius have together been responsible for the poisoning of King Fortinbras. The narrative provided by Abraham is unapologetically extra-textual, providing the play with a 'sixth act' extrapolated from potentially incongruous or jarring elements of Shakespeare's work. By taking inspiration from Abraham's methodology, Berthin indicates her own goals as a reader of literature. Reading for a text's phantoms may be perceived as imposing false, unintended logic on classic texts, but adherents of this method see themselves as expanding the boundaries of reading, allowing for reflection on literature's own secret-keeping and secret-making processes.

Much of the early part of Berthin's monograph is taken up with explanation of the crypt and the phantom, and with a comprehensive analysis of the many ways in which Abraham and Torok's work might complement advances in literary theory. Žižek's 'the Real', Lacan's 'Lalangue', Lyotard's 'the figural', and Kristeva's 'abject' are among the many concepts that are invoked to help describe the haunting of language by its inadequately symbolic others. In the midst of all the necessary theoretical exposition, Berthin can be forgiven for not offering many extensive and original readings of Gothic texts at this stage of the work. A phantomatic interpretation of Adam...