Journal Article

Ghost Words: Nightwood's Cryptic Imperatives

Dustin, Lheisa

2015

Overview

In Nightwood,haunting signals the simultaneous presence and absence of the love object to the subject, who in psychoanalytic terms, disavows (simultaneously affirms and denies, includes and excludes) the object.5 Nightwood's frequent spectral tropes suggest the ghosts of rapacious and loved family members, of unspeakable scenes, and, by extension, of nation and gender. In Nightwood, phantoms are literarily functional: the social fabric of the novel presents a collective staging of love and loss.6 Ghosts of lost loves animate the characters' behavior in relation to phantasma tic institutional power (the nobility, the military, the church, and the medical profession), as well as influencing their behavior in relation to human love objects. [...]though Abraham and Torok write that \"to stage a word . . . constitutes an attempt at exorcism, an attempt... to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm\" {Shell, 176), I argue that Nightwood offers no exorcism through its ghost words because it is the social realm itself that haunts its characters, who like its circus people, have no inner life separate from \"public life\" (11).

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Subject: Behavior / Child abandonment / Cryptography / Desire / Foster children / Gender / Ghosts / Grandmothers / Identity / Language / Mothers / Rhetorical figures / Shame / Subjectivity / Syntax / Words