The Hauntological Example: The City as the Haunt of Writing in the Texts of Iain Sinclair

Abstract

Charles Dickens uses these words near the beginning of ‘The Haunted Man’, a seasonal ghost story set in London. The topography of the sentence is interesting, not least for its own spectral, self-haunted doubling. The narrator is apparently troubled by a spirit which anticipates or haunts the narrative which is to follow. The sentence is marked by an excess, a displacement within itself that troubles the stable location of any identity. There is haunting within the very architecture of the sentence. The emphasis rests on that already troubled and troubling sign — ghost — as signifier of a signifier, rather than by the always already absent thing itself. This differential emphasis is redoubled in Dickens’s own written stress and marked by the printer’s use of small upper-case letters for the word ‘ghost’. Then, that troublesome phrase ‘word, Ghost’ may be read with a little — but only a very little — forcing as ‘word-ghost’: a ghost composed of words, the trace of a trace inscribing words; not a ghost at all but the ghost of a ghost, a spectral signature or trace, haunting the very words on the page and referring, if at all, to an apparitional trembling.

‘can you seriously expect anybody to understand these things?’

Mike Goldmark to Iain Sinclair (LT)

Who wrote this book?

Iain Sinclair (RD)

L’avenir est aux fantômes

Jacques Derrida (S)

Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at research seminars at the Universities of Dundee and Stirling. I would like to thank Nicholas Royle for inviting me to Stirling to give the paper at his ‘Phantom fx’ research seminar. I would also like to thank Jane Stabler and Martin McQuillan for their ingenious questions which, in different ways, allowed me to reshape this essay, which bears their indelible spectral traces.