ABSTRACT
What has literature to do with ghosts? The word ‘ghost’ is related to and originates in the German Geist, a word that Chambers Dictionary defines as ‘spirit, any inspiring or dominating principle’. The OED gives, as its first and fourth definitions of ‘ghost’, the ‘soul or spirit, as the principle of life’ and ‘a person’. In these respects, the ghost is fundamental to our thinking about the human: to be human is to have a spirit, a soul, a Geist or ghost. But the more common modern sense of ‘ghost’ (albeit only listed seventh in the OED) involves the idea of a spectre, an apparition of the dead, a revenant, the dead returned to a kind of spectral existence – an entity not alive but also not quite, not finally, dead. Ghosts disturb our sense of the separation of the living from the dead – which is why they can be so frightening, so uncanny. These conflicting senses of the word ‘ghost’ suggest that ghosts are both exterior and central to our sense of the human. Ghosts are paradoxical since they are both fundamental to the human, fundamentally human, and a denial or disturbance of the human, the very being of the inhuman. We propose to devote this chapter, to dedicate it, to the living-dead, to the ghost(s) of literature. And we propose that this scandal of the ghost, its paradoxy, is embedded in the very thing that we call literature, inscribed in multiple and haunting ways, in novels, poems and plays.
