Jamesian Hauntology: On the Poetics of Condensation

What does it mean to be “conscious” of the subject’s double consciousness that itself is doubled. Many of James’s richest short fictions are thought experiments that extend specific grammatical moods into overarching narrative modes. What does it mean to remember something that never existed? James’s poetic answer inheres not only in the intersubjective return of the suppressed but also in the delineation of architectural space. If the figurative ashes of an extinct youth are at once “impalpable” and yet “afloat in the very air,” can this metaphor not be said to represent the liminal status, the emergence into the phenomenological, of the ghost--and of James’s hauntology?