Katy Shaw

This chapter considers how the capacity of the specter as a double suggests unresolved terms in David Peace’s Patient X (2018). Doubling is etymologically connected to the spectral and the uncanniness of the specter can alert the living to its pervading presence in their contemporary world. The dynamic of this relationship forms a central concern of Peace’s short story cycle. In each story, spectral effects impact on notions of the self, challenging the singular ‘I’ and raising the possibility of an/other. Through a subtle noise, movement, interactive vision or tactile encounter, the textual presentation of the specter generates questions regarding identity and existentialism in Peace’s protagonist. Across the text, the spectral takes many forms, functioning to highlight the unexpected nature of the return, and to raise questions about the self and the Other, the individual and society, and understandings of our historical situatedness.

Hauntology is a peculiarly English phenomenon. Karl Marx famously claimed that his Communist revolution would start in England and, more than a hundred years on, England has become a haunt for the specters of its most recent past. The existence of this Pivot is a timely reminder of the ever growing and changing field of critical and popular enquiry on hauntology. Hauntology destabilizes space as well as time, and encourages an ‘existential orientation’ in the haunted subject, making the living consider the precarious boundary between being and non-being. By the new millennium, hauntology had become part of the zeitgeist of academic and popular criticism in England. In areas as diverse as architecture and music, art and psychoanalysis, a range of critics harnessed Derrida’s concept as a critical lens through which to read a twenty-first century English culture seemingly more concerned with co-opting the past than embracing the future.

This chapter explores the haunting use of intertextuality in Butterworth’s 2009 stage drama Jerusalem. It considers how the play ingests exterior texts in its narrative of the present and why it frequently repeats symbolic representations through citation and reference. The paradox highlighted by these intertextual returns captures the difference and sameness, the recognizable uncanny, in the every day. In considering how and why intertextual subjects emerge again in Butterworth’s most successful drama, the chapter surveys extensive meta-textual connectivities to examine the function of intertextual haunts on the contemporary English stage.

Using the power of literary representation to subvert and challenge, the twenty-first century authors profiled by this study stage various debates in relation to the specter, interrogating concepts of anxiety and justice, intertextuality and hospitality, selfhood and trauma. The conclusion reflects on why their works are most radical in their spectral moments and in their representation of a range of specters that refuse to submit to homogeneity, but rather disrupt and open up moments or issues to uncertainty, challenging both the writer and reader in the contemporary moment.

In Derrida’s theory of the spectral, the home is not a safe site, but rather exists as a borderland in which liminal states exist side by side. In Zadie Smith’s novel NW (2012), spectral dimensions of the homely and the domestic connect the ‘haunt’ to the compulsion to return to a place, as well as to notions of unconditional hospitality to the spectral ‘Other’. Through their connections with the architecture and geography of Smith’s North West London, the spectres of her novel critically frame England’s capital city as ‘simultaneously living and spectral’ in a series of problematic encounters that demonstrate the consequences of offering unconditional hospitality to the specter. Beginning with a titular concern with space and place, NW goes on to establish an extensive exploration of spectral topographies that are mobilized by its various narratives to explore the agency of the past in the present.

Post-millennial writings function as a useful prism through which we can understand contemporary English culture and its compulsion to revisit the immediate past. The critical practice of hauntology turns to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future. Since the Year 2000, popular culture has been inundated with representations of those who occupy a space between being and non-being and defy ontological criteria. This Pivot explores a range of contemporary English literatures - from the poetry of Simon Armitage and the drama of Jez Butterworth, to the fiction of Zadie Smith and the stories of David Peace - that collectively unite to represent a twenty-first century world full of specters, reminiscence and representations of spectral encounters. These specters become visible and significant as they interact with a range of social, political and economic discourses that continue to speak to the contemporary period. The enduring fascination with the spectral offers valuable insights into a contemporary English culture in which spectral manifestations signal towards larger social anxieties as well as to specific historical events and recurrent cultural preoccupations. The specter confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realisation that we must engage with it in order to create meaning. Narrative agency is the primary motivating force of its return, and the repetition of the specter functions to highlight new meanings and perspectives. Harnessing hauntology as a lens through which to consider the specters haunting twenty-first century English writings, this Pivot examines the emergence of a vein of hauntological literature that profiles the pervasive presence of the past in our new millennium.