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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents and the reading of print and handwriting-on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth.
-JOSEPH CONRAD1
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
-WALLACE STEVENS2
If testimony [. . .] became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted.
-JACQUES DERRIDA3
Writing about one's past, which is what autobiography is about, has to do with the summoning of specters. Still, if autobiography is haunted, it also haunts its readers and interpreters, who are enthralled but also burdened by the furtive glimpse they are allowed into the other's darkness. Like Douglas, one of Henry James's narrators in The Turn of the Screw, the literary scholar might well ask, If autobiography as ghost story gives the readerly effect another turn of the screw, what do you say an autobiography about ghosts themselves will do?4 Since I am concerned here with the relationship of autobiography to spectrality, I take James's celebrated ghost story as a case in point.
In her seminal essay "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Shoshana Felman observes that The Turn of the Screw could be read "not only as a remarkable ghost story but also as a no less remarkable detective story," the story of "a singularly redoubtable crime: the murder of a child" (175, original italics).5 To these two forms then I add autobiography, particularly the autobiographical memoir, since the novella's main plot allegorizes the autobiographical process in the first-person chronicle of a young woman's experience as a governess in a haunted house.
In terms of the tale's critical history, it is interesting to observe that attempts to liberate it from the traditional polemic between the apparitionists (those insisting on the reality of the ghosts) and the hallucinationists (those pathologizing the governess-notably, Edmund Wilson) have often involved a rethinking of its generic structure. Thus, several years before the 1977 publication of Felman's essay in Yale French Studies, which used Lacanian...