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Turning the Screw of Interpretation
Whatd oes the act of turning a screw have to do with literature? What does the act of turning a screw have to do with psychoanalysis? Are these two questions related? If so, might their relationship help to define the status of literature? It is these rather odd questions that the present study intends to articulate, so as to give them a further turn, to investigate and interrogate them on the
basis of Henry James's famous short novel, The Turn of the Screw.
basis of Henry James's famous short novel, The Turn of the Screw.
114 pages, ebook
Published January 1, 1977
About the author
Shoshana Felman
22 books21 followersShoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.
Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.
Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.
Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.
Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.
Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.
Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.
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January 3, 2024
• What does the act of turning a screw have to do with literature? What does the act of turning a screw have to do with psychoanalysis? Are these two questions related? If so, might their relation- ship help to define the status of literature? It is these rather odd questions that the present study intends to articulate, so as to give them a further turn, to investigate and interrogate them on the basis of Henry James's famous short novel, The Turn of the Screw.
• An Uncanny Reading Effect
o The plot of The Turn of the Screw is well known: a young woman answering a want ad in a newspaper goes to meet a "perfect gentleman," a "bachelor in the prime of life," who hires her to take charge of his niece Flora and his nephew Miles, two little orphans who live in a secluded country house belonging to him.
o She is to be supreme authority of the two charges, turning to him for help at no time.
o House is also haunted by ghosts of two servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel
o Her task becomes to save the children, and she does so by attempting to catch the children in the act of communion with spirits
o Flora, the little girl, caught by the governess in presence of the phantom of Miss Jessel, denies seeing the vision and falls seriously ill following the vehement accusations directed at her by the governess, whom she thenceforth holds in abhorrence
o Miles seemingly surrenders by pronouncing the name of Peter Quint face to face with his ghost, at that very moment dies in the arms of the governess as she clasps him to her breast in moral triumph. It is with this pathetically ironical embrace of a corpse that the story ends.
o The effect of this story is wild! what is perceived as the most scandalous thing about this scandalous story is that we are forced to participate in the scandal, that the reader's innocence cannot remain intact
o In other words, the scandal is not simply in the text, it resides in our relation to the text, in the text's effect on us, its readers: what is outrageous in the text is not simply that of which the text is speaking, but that which makes it speak to us.
o Another scandalous reading: "Freudian reading" of The Turn of the Screw. In 1934, Edmund Wilson for the first time suggests explicitly that The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study of a case of neurosis: the ghosts, accordingly, do not really exist; they are but figments of the governess's sick imagination, mere hallucinations and projections symptomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires
"If the ghosts of 'The Turn of the Screw' are not real, certainly the controversy over them is.
o Would it be possible to say, indeed, that the reality of the debate is in fact more significant for the impact of the text than the reality of the ghosts? Could the critical debate itself be considered a ghost effect? Even more than the debate's content, it is its style which seems to me instructive
o The hysteria of the text and the salvation of the text repeat itself in the critical arena
o Another critic, repeating and emphasizing the term "prepossession," agrees: "We must agree, I think, that Freudian critics of the tale are strongly prepossessed." 8 But what precisely is a "prepossessed" critic if not one whose mind is in advance in the possession of some demon, one who, like James's children, is himself possessed? Pos- sessed-should we say-by the ghost of Freud? It is clear, in any case, that the urgency of rescuing, of saving the text, in a critical account like Heilman's, strongly resembles the exorcistic operations of the governess vis-a-vis her "possessed" charges, and that the critical confrontation appears itself as a kind of struggle against some ghost-effect that has somehow been awakened by psycho- analysis. The scene of the critical debate is thus a repetition of the scene dramatized in the text.
o The reading effect is to reproduce the text, to participate in it, to perform it by repeating it.
o my intention has been merely to suggest-to make explicit-this uncanny trapping power of Henry James's text as an inescapable reading- effect.
o Taking such reading-effects into consideration, we shall here undertake a reading of the text which will at the same time be articulated with a reading of its readings. This two-level reading- which also must return upon itself-will be concerned with the following questions: What is the nature of a reading-effect as such? and by extension: what is a reading? What does the text have to say about its own reading? What is a "Freudian reading" (and what is it not)? What in a text invites-and what in a text resists-a psychoanalytical interpretation? In what way does literature authorize psychoanalysis to elaborate a discourse about literature, and in what way, having granted its authorization, does literature disqualify that discourse? THESIS
• What is a Freudian Reading
o Mark Spilka on Freudian critics of Screw: these Freudian critics have not been sufficiently Freudian
o how Freudian is a Freudian reading? Up to what point can one be Freudian? At what point does a reading start to be "Freudian enough"? What is Freudian in a Freudian reading, and in what way can it be defined and measured?
o What, however, was it in James's text that originally called out for a "Freudian" reading? It was, as the very title of Wilson's article suggests, not so much the sexuality as "The ambiguity of Henry James.”
o The Freudian critic's job, in this perspective, is but to pull the answer out of its hiding place- not so much to give an answer to the text as to answer for the text: to be answerable for it, to answer in its place, to replace the question with an answer.
o Such an operation, however, invites two fundamental questions: Does "James" (or James's text) authorize this way of answering for him? Does "Freud" (or Freud's text) authorize this way of answering through him?
o The vulgar is the literal, insofar as it is unambiguous: "the story won't tell; not in any literal, vulgar way." The literal is "vulgar" because it stops the movement constitutive of meaning, because it blocks and interrupts the endless process of metaphorical substitution. The vulgar, therefore, is anything which misses, or falls short of, the dimension of the symbolic, anything which rules out, or excludes, meaning as a loss and as a flight, -anything which strives, in other words, to eliminate from language its inherent silence, anything which misses the specific way in which a text actively "won't tell."
o Freud, like James, begins with a reminder that the validity of an interpretation is a function not only of its truth, but also of its tact
o Sexuality, says Freud, is not to be taken in its literal, popular sense: in its analytical extension, it goes "lower and also higher" than its literal meaning, it extends both beyond and below. This is a work of inadequation: the psychoanalytical notion of sexuality, says Freud, comprises both more and less than the literal sexual act.
o for Freud, as we have seen, not only is the status of sexuality not simple: composed as it is by two dynamically contradictory factors, sexuality is precisely what rules out simplicity as such.
o It is indeed because sexuality is essentially the violence of its own non-simplicity, of its own inherent "conflict between two forces," the violence of its own division and self-contradiction, that it is experienced as anxiety and lived as terror.
o And, indeed, what is the subject of The Turn of the Screw if not this very conflict which inhabits meaning, the inherent conflict which structures the relationship between sex and sense?
o sexuality is not, however, the "text's meaning": it is rather that through which meaning in the text does not come off, that which in the text, and through which the text, fails to mean, that which can engender but a conflict of interpretations, a critical debate and discord precise- ly like the polemic which surrounds The Turn of the Screw and with which we are concerned here.
• The Conflict Interpretations: the Turns of the Debate
o In repeating as they do the primal scene of the text's meaning as division, the critics can by no means master or exhaust the very meaning of that division, but only act the division out, perform
it, be part of it. THESIS
o The attempt, however, to eliminate contradiction itself partakes of the contradiction: the affirmation of meaning as undivided is simultaneously one that excludes the position of the opponent; the homogeneity of meaning can be asserted but through the expulsion of its heterogeneity. In precisely trying to unify the meaning of the text and to proclaim it as unambiguous, the critics only mark more forcefully its constitutive division and duplicity***
o In thus examining the paradigm of the so-called "Freudian read- ing of The Turn of the Screw" and its distortion of Freud's theory as we could here but begin to read it in Freud's text, our intention has been to displace and dislocate the much-repeated, central question of the polemic: "is the Freudian reading true or false?" by suggesting that we do not yet even know what a Freudian reading really is.
o The question, therefore, can no longer be simply to decide whether in effect the "Freudian" reading is true or false, correct or incorrect. It can be both at the same time. It is no doubt correct, but it misses nonetheless the most important thing: it is blind to the very textuality of the text. The question of a reading's "truth" must be at least complicated and re-thought through another question, which Freud, indeed, has raised, and taught us to articulate: what does such "truth" (or any "truth") leave out? What is it made to miss? What does it have as its function to overlook? What, precisely, is its residue, the remainder it does not account for?
o The Freudian reading is no doubt "true," but no truer than the opposed positions which contradict it. And it is "false," indeed, to the extent that it excludes them.
• Turns of the Story’s Frame: A Theory of Narrative
o The actual story of The Turn of the Screw (that of the governess and the ghosts) is preceded by a prologue which is both posterior and exterior to it, and which places it as a story, as a speech event
o The narrated story is thus presented as the center of the frame -the focal point of a narrative space which designates and circumscribes it from the outside as its inside. Placed around the story which becomes its center, the narrative frame, however, frames another center within its literal space
o But while the prologue's function would thus seem to be to relate the story to its narrator, the prologue of The Turn of the Screw rather disconnects the story from the narrator since it introduces not one narrator, but three: 1) the person who says "I," the first person "general narrator" who transmits to us the story with which he himself had no direct connection, and which he heard from Douglas; 2) Douglas, who reads the story to the circle around the fire, but who did not participate in it himself.
o The existence of the story is thus assured only through the constitution of a narrative chain, in which the narrators relay
the story from one to the other.
o In including not only the content of the story but also the figure of the reader within the fireside circle, the frame indeed leaves no one out: it pulls the outside of the story into its inside by enclosing in it what is usually outside it: its own readers.
o No one, then, is left on the "outside" of the story, except the story's inside.
o The "main interest" of the story is thus the "thickness" it acquires through its own reading
o The very act of telling, of narration, proceeds then from the potentially infinite repercussion of an effect of reading
o The story, therefore, seems to frame itself into losing not only its origin but also its very title: having lost both its name and the authority of its author, the narrative emerges, out of the turns of its frame, not only authorless and nameless, but also unentitled to its own authority over itself, having no capacity to denominate, no right to name itself
o What, however, is the nature of the act of "seeing"? This is the crucial question raised by the appearance of the ghosts, not simply because the ghosts only appear when the governess sees them, but also because each of their appearances enacts the same specular confrontation as that between the other couples: the same exchange of symmetrical, dual glances occurs between the governess and the supernatural intruder.
o Freud's analysis of the movement of psychic energies back and forth between sleep and wakefulness via transference seems perfectly tailored to fit precisely the visual dream-like figures of the ghosts. Seeing is thus above all transferring
• The Scene of Writing: Purloined Letters
o The fact that "the story's written," underlined by the narrative suspense that that fact creates, has two important implications:
1. The story is a text and not just a series of events: it has its own materiality and its own place; it exists as a material object
2. As a material object, the manuscript is independent of the narrator, who is, rather, himself dependent on it: the narrator is dependent on the place and materiality of the written word
o 3 consequences of this
1. It is impossible for the narrator to begin; there seems a problem inherent in the beginning as such, since it is first postponed, and then replaced by a “prologue”
2. the manuscript’s place is a “locked drawer”—a closed, secret place: for the story to be told, the lock has to be forced, the hideout opened up: a seal of silence must be broken and the story’s opening is thus literally and figuratively an outbreak.
3. In order for there to be any narrative at all, Douglas must have the manuscript sent to him through the mail. There is thus an address on the text: the story is a letter. Indeed, it is triply so, sent first by the governess to Douglas, then by Douglas to himself, then by Douglas to the narrator. As a letter, the narrative entails both a change of location and a change of address
o Insofar as the narrative itself is an effect of writing and as such is dependent on the letter of its text, its very telling involves the non-possession of its beginning.
o the letters become a crucial dramatic element in the narrative plot precisely because of their unreadability
If the letters' very resistance to daylight, to transparency and to meaning, is indicative of their participation in an unconscious economy; if, as signifiers par excellence of that unconscious economy, they can only be meaningful through their own censorship, signify through their own blacking-out
Then the crucial theoretical question for both literature and psychoanalysis, for the reader of textual letters as well as for the interpreter of the text of the unconscious, would be the following one: how can unreadable letters be read, even as they demand to be read as unreadable? This question, which is indeed raised by The Turn of the Screw on all levels, is crucial as much for the reader as for the characters of the story
Our task would perhaps then become not so much to read the unreadable as a variant of the readable, but, to the very contrary, to rethink the readable itself, and hence, to attempt to read it as a variant of the unreadable
o The paradoxical contract between the governess and the Master is thus from the outset a contract of disconnection, of non-correspondence. Constitutive of an aporia, of a relation of non-relation, the Master's discourse is very like the condition of the unconscious as such: Law itself is but a form of Censorship.
• Part 6: The Scene of Reading: The Surrender of the Name
o The Turn of the Screw is thus organized around a double mystery: the mystery of the letters' content and the mystery of the ghosts. Like the letters, the ghosts, too, are essentially figures of silence
o On the one hand, then, the ghosts-which are, by definition, "horrors" ("What is he? He's a horror" [ch. 5, p. 22]; "For the woman's a horror of horrors" [ch. 7, p. 32])-are as mute, that is, as silent as the letters. And on the other hand, the letters themselves, through their very silence, point to "horrors"
o If the ghosts, themselves marked with the sign of negation, come to fill in-so to speak-the letters' gaps, or at least to occupy a place homologous to the vacant interior of the letters, could it not be said that the ghosts are in reality nothing other than the letters' content, 32 and that the letters' content could thus itself be nothing other than a ghost-effect?
So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page (ch. 3, p. 17).
o The governess is thus a reader, undergoing the effects of letters; of letters which come through the mail or are written to be mailed, as well as those which can be read on the printed pages of a book. The governess's very first question, upon receipt of the letter from the head-master of Miles's school, is indeed the question par excellence of the interpreter: What does it mean
o reading is again revealed to be the repetition of a love story, the story of a love addressed to and directed toward the knowledge of the Other
• 7: A Child is Killed
o What, indeed, is the cause of Miles's death? The final paragraph suggests that he is accidentally suffocated by the governess in the strength of her passionate embrace
The word "grasp," which commands this closing paragraph, thus appears to account for Miles's death. Interestingly enough, this same word "grasp" also commands the opening paragraph of the last chapter
o The act of reading, the attempt to grasp and hold the signified, goes thus hand in hand with the repression or obliteration of a signifier-a repression the purpose of which is to eliminate meaning's division
o Let us take another look at Flora's boat. It is as a phallic symbol
that the boat disturbs the governess and convinces her of the perversity of the children: "They know-it's too monstrous: they know, they know! " The screw, or the phallic mast, thus constitutes for the governess a key to meaning, a master-signifier: the very key to what the Other knows.
o The Turn of the Screw appears indeed to have carried this ideal
of proximity or "nearness" (of the criminal and the detective to the reader) to its ultimate limits, since the criminal himself is here as close as possible to the detective, and the detective is only a detective in his (her) function as a reader. Incarnated in the governess, the detective and the criminal both are but dramatizations of the condition of the reader
• 8: Meaning and Madness: The Turn of the Screw
o The fundamental metaphor of t
• An Uncanny Reading Effect
o The plot of The Turn of the Screw is well known: a young woman answering a want ad in a newspaper goes to meet a "perfect gentleman," a "bachelor in the prime of life," who hires her to take charge of his niece Flora and his nephew Miles, two little orphans who live in a secluded country house belonging to him.
o She is to be supreme authority of the two charges, turning to him for help at no time.
o House is also haunted by ghosts of two servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel
o Her task becomes to save the children, and she does so by attempting to catch the children in the act of communion with spirits
o Flora, the little girl, caught by the governess in presence of the phantom of Miss Jessel, denies seeing the vision and falls seriously ill following the vehement accusations directed at her by the governess, whom she thenceforth holds in abhorrence
o Miles seemingly surrenders by pronouncing the name of Peter Quint face to face with his ghost, at that very moment dies in the arms of the governess as she clasps him to her breast in moral triumph. It is with this pathetically ironical embrace of a corpse that the story ends.
o The effect of this story is wild! what is perceived as the most scandalous thing about this scandalous story is that we are forced to participate in the scandal, that the reader's innocence cannot remain intact
o In other words, the scandal is not simply in the text, it resides in our relation to the text, in the text's effect on us, its readers: what is outrageous in the text is not simply that of which the text is speaking, but that which makes it speak to us.
o Another scandalous reading: "Freudian reading" of The Turn of the Screw. In 1934, Edmund Wilson for the first time suggests explicitly that The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study of a case of neurosis: the ghosts, accordingly, do not really exist; they are but figments of the governess's sick imagination, mere hallucinations and projections symptomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires
"If the ghosts of 'The Turn of the Screw' are not real, certainly the controversy over them is.
o Would it be possible to say, indeed, that the reality of the debate is in fact more significant for the impact of the text than the reality of the ghosts? Could the critical debate itself be considered a ghost effect? Even more than the debate's content, it is its style which seems to me instructive
o The hysteria of the text and the salvation of the text repeat itself in the critical arena
o Another critic, repeating and emphasizing the term "prepossession," agrees: "We must agree, I think, that Freudian critics of the tale are strongly prepossessed." 8 But what precisely is a "prepossessed" critic if not one whose mind is in advance in the possession of some demon, one who, like James's children, is himself possessed? Pos- sessed-should we say-by the ghost of Freud? It is clear, in any case, that the urgency of rescuing, of saving the text, in a critical account like Heilman's, strongly resembles the exorcistic operations of the governess vis-a-vis her "possessed" charges, and that the critical confrontation appears itself as a kind of struggle against some ghost-effect that has somehow been awakened by psycho- analysis. The scene of the critical debate is thus a repetition of the scene dramatized in the text.
o The reading effect is to reproduce the text, to participate in it, to perform it by repeating it.
o my intention has been merely to suggest-to make explicit-this uncanny trapping power of Henry James's text as an inescapable reading- effect.
o Taking such reading-effects into consideration, we shall here undertake a reading of the text which will at the same time be articulated with a reading of its readings. This two-level reading- which also must return upon itself-will be concerned with the following questions: What is the nature of a reading-effect as such? and by extension: what is a reading? What does the text have to say about its own reading? What is a "Freudian reading" (and what is it not)? What in a text invites-and what in a text resists-a psychoanalytical interpretation? In what way does literature authorize psychoanalysis to elaborate a discourse about literature, and in what way, having granted its authorization, does literature disqualify that discourse? THESIS
• What is a Freudian Reading
o Mark Spilka on Freudian critics of Screw: these Freudian critics have not been sufficiently Freudian
o how Freudian is a Freudian reading? Up to what point can one be Freudian? At what point does a reading start to be "Freudian enough"? What is Freudian in a Freudian reading, and in what way can it be defined and measured?
o What, however, was it in James's text that originally called out for a "Freudian" reading? It was, as the very title of Wilson's article suggests, not so much the sexuality as "The ambiguity of Henry James.”
o The Freudian critic's job, in this perspective, is but to pull the answer out of its hiding place- not so much to give an answer to the text as to answer for the text: to be answerable for it, to answer in its place, to replace the question with an answer.
o Such an operation, however, invites two fundamental questions: Does "James" (or James's text) authorize this way of answering for him? Does "Freud" (or Freud's text) authorize this way of answering through him?
o The vulgar is the literal, insofar as it is unambiguous: "the story won't tell; not in any literal, vulgar way." The literal is "vulgar" because it stops the movement constitutive of meaning, because it blocks and interrupts the endless process of metaphorical substitution. The vulgar, therefore, is anything which misses, or falls short of, the dimension of the symbolic, anything which rules out, or excludes, meaning as a loss and as a flight, -anything which strives, in other words, to eliminate from language its inherent silence, anything which misses the specific way in which a text actively "won't tell."
o Freud, like James, begins with a reminder that the validity of an interpretation is a function not only of its truth, but also of its tact
o Sexuality, says Freud, is not to be taken in its literal, popular sense: in its analytical extension, it goes "lower and also higher" than its literal meaning, it extends both beyond and below. This is a work of inadequation: the psychoanalytical notion of sexuality, says Freud, comprises both more and less than the literal sexual act.
o for Freud, as we have seen, not only is the status of sexuality not simple: composed as it is by two dynamically contradictory factors, sexuality is precisely what rules out simplicity as such.
o It is indeed because sexuality is essentially the violence of its own non-simplicity, of its own inherent "conflict between two forces," the violence of its own division and self-contradiction, that it is experienced as anxiety and lived as terror.
o And, indeed, what is the subject of The Turn of the Screw if not this very conflict which inhabits meaning, the inherent conflict which structures the relationship between sex and sense?
o sexuality is not, however, the "text's meaning": it is rather that through which meaning in the text does not come off, that which in the text, and through which the text, fails to mean, that which can engender but a conflict of interpretations, a critical debate and discord precise- ly like the polemic which surrounds The Turn of the Screw and with which we are concerned here.
• The Conflict Interpretations: the Turns of the Debate
o In repeating as they do the primal scene of the text's meaning as division, the critics can by no means master or exhaust the very meaning of that division, but only act the division out, perform
it, be part of it. THESIS
o The attempt, however, to eliminate contradiction itself partakes of the contradiction: the affirmation of meaning as undivided is simultaneously one that excludes the position of the opponent; the homogeneity of meaning can be asserted but through the expulsion of its heterogeneity. In precisely trying to unify the meaning of the text and to proclaim it as unambiguous, the critics only mark more forcefully its constitutive division and duplicity***
o In thus examining the paradigm of the so-called "Freudian read- ing of The Turn of the Screw" and its distortion of Freud's theory as we could here but begin to read it in Freud's text, our intention has been to displace and dislocate the much-repeated, central question of the polemic: "is the Freudian reading true or false?" by suggesting that we do not yet even know what a Freudian reading really is.
o The question, therefore, can no longer be simply to decide whether in effect the "Freudian" reading is true or false, correct or incorrect. It can be both at the same time. It is no doubt correct, but it misses nonetheless the most important thing: it is blind to the very textuality of the text. The question of a reading's "truth" must be at least complicated and re-thought through another question, which Freud, indeed, has raised, and taught us to articulate: what does such "truth" (or any "truth") leave out? What is it made to miss? What does it have as its function to overlook? What, precisely, is its residue, the remainder it does not account for?
o The Freudian reading is no doubt "true," but no truer than the opposed positions which contradict it. And it is "false," indeed, to the extent that it excludes them.
• Turns of the Story’s Frame: A Theory of Narrative
o The actual story of The Turn of the Screw (that of the governess and the ghosts) is preceded by a prologue which is both posterior and exterior to it, and which places it as a story, as a speech event
o The narrated story is thus presented as the center of the frame -the focal point of a narrative space which designates and circumscribes it from the outside as its inside. Placed around the story which becomes its center, the narrative frame, however, frames another center within its literal space
o But while the prologue's function would thus seem to be to relate the story to its narrator, the prologue of The Turn of the Screw rather disconnects the story from the narrator since it introduces not one narrator, but three: 1) the person who says "I," the first person "general narrator" who transmits to us the story with which he himself had no direct connection, and which he heard from Douglas; 2) Douglas, who reads the story to the circle around the fire, but who did not participate in it himself.
o The existence of the story is thus assured only through the constitution of a narrative chain, in which the narrators relay
the story from one to the other.
o In including not only the content of the story but also the figure of the reader within the fireside circle, the frame indeed leaves no one out: it pulls the outside of the story into its inside by enclosing in it what is usually outside it: its own readers.
o No one, then, is left on the "outside" of the story, except the story's inside.
o The "main interest" of the story is thus the "thickness" it acquires through its own reading
o The very act of telling, of narration, proceeds then from the potentially infinite repercussion of an effect of reading
o The story, therefore, seems to frame itself into losing not only its origin but also its very title: having lost both its name and the authority of its author, the narrative emerges, out of the turns of its frame, not only authorless and nameless, but also unentitled to its own authority over itself, having no capacity to denominate, no right to name itself
o What, however, is the nature of the act of "seeing"? This is the crucial question raised by the appearance of the ghosts, not simply because the ghosts only appear when the governess sees them, but also because each of their appearances enacts the same specular confrontation as that between the other couples: the same exchange of symmetrical, dual glances occurs between the governess and the supernatural intruder.
o Freud's analysis of the movement of psychic energies back and forth between sleep and wakefulness via transference seems perfectly tailored to fit precisely the visual dream-like figures of the ghosts. Seeing is thus above all transferring
• The Scene of Writing: Purloined Letters
o The fact that "the story's written," underlined by the narrative suspense that that fact creates, has two important implications:
1. The story is a text and not just a series of events: it has its own materiality and its own place; it exists as a material object
2. As a material object, the manuscript is independent of the narrator, who is, rather, himself dependent on it: the narrator is dependent on the place and materiality of the written word
o 3 consequences of this
1. It is impossible for the narrator to begin; there seems a problem inherent in the beginning as such, since it is first postponed, and then replaced by a “prologue”
2. the manuscript’s place is a “locked drawer”—a closed, secret place: for the story to be told, the lock has to be forced, the hideout opened up: a seal of silence must be broken and the story’s opening is thus literally and figuratively an outbreak.
3. In order for there to be any narrative at all, Douglas must have the manuscript sent to him through the mail. There is thus an address on the text: the story is a letter. Indeed, it is triply so, sent first by the governess to Douglas, then by Douglas to himself, then by Douglas to the narrator. As a letter, the narrative entails both a change of location and a change of address
o Insofar as the narrative itself is an effect of writing and as such is dependent on the letter of its text, its very telling involves the non-possession of its beginning.
o the letters become a crucial dramatic element in the narrative plot precisely because of their unreadability
If the letters' very resistance to daylight, to transparency and to meaning, is indicative of their participation in an unconscious economy; if, as signifiers par excellence of that unconscious economy, they can only be meaningful through their own censorship, signify through their own blacking-out
Then the crucial theoretical question for both literature and psychoanalysis, for the reader of textual letters as well as for the interpreter of the text of the unconscious, would be the following one: how can unreadable letters be read, even as they demand to be read as unreadable? This question, which is indeed raised by The Turn of the Screw on all levels, is crucial as much for the reader as for the characters of the story
Our task would perhaps then become not so much to read the unreadable as a variant of the readable, but, to the very contrary, to rethink the readable itself, and hence, to attempt to read it as a variant of the unreadable
o The paradoxical contract between the governess and the Master is thus from the outset a contract of disconnection, of non-correspondence. Constitutive of an aporia, of a relation of non-relation, the Master's discourse is very like the condition of the unconscious as such: Law itself is but a form of Censorship.
• Part 6: The Scene of Reading: The Surrender of the Name
o The Turn of the Screw is thus organized around a double mystery: the mystery of the letters' content and the mystery of the ghosts. Like the letters, the ghosts, too, are essentially figures of silence
o On the one hand, then, the ghosts-which are, by definition, "horrors" ("What is he? He's a horror" [ch. 5, p. 22]; "For the woman's a horror of horrors" [ch. 7, p. 32])-are as mute, that is, as silent as the letters. And on the other hand, the letters themselves, through their very silence, point to "horrors"
o If the ghosts, themselves marked with the sign of negation, come to fill in-so to speak-the letters' gaps, or at least to occupy a place homologous to the vacant interior of the letters, could it not be said that the ghosts are in reality nothing other than the letters' content, 32 and that the letters' content could thus itself be nothing other than a ghost-effect?
So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page (ch. 3, p. 17).
o The governess is thus a reader, undergoing the effects of letters; of letters which come through the mail or are written to be mailed, as well as those which can be read on the printed pages of a book. The governess's very first question, upon receipt of the letter from the head-master of Miles's school, is indeed the question par excellence of the interpreter: What does it mean
o reading is again revealed to be the repetition of a love story, the story of a love addressed to and directed toward the knowledge of the Other
• 7: A Child is Killed
o What, indeed, is the cause of Miles's death? The final paragraph suggests that he is accidentally suffocated by the governess in the strength of her passionate embrace
The word "grasp," which commands this closing paragraph, thus appears to account for Miles's death. Interestingly enough, this same word "grasp" also commands the opening paragraph of the last chapter
o The act of reading, the attempt to grasp and hold the signified, goes thus hand in hand with the repression or obliteration of a signifier-a repression the purpose of which is to eliminate meaning's division
o Let us take another look at Flora's boat. It is as a phallic symbol
that the boat disturbs the governess and convinces her of the perversity of the children: "They know-it's too monstrous: they know, they know! " The screw, or the phallic mast, thus constitutes for the governess a key to meaning, a master-signifier: the very key to what the Other knows.
o The Turn of the Screw appears indeed to have carried this ideal
of proximity or "nearness" (of the criminal and the detective to the reader) to its ultimate limits, since the criminal himself is here as close as possible to the detective, and the detective is only a detective in his (her) function as a reader. Incarnated in the governess, the detective and the criminal both are but dramatizations of the condition of the reader
• 8: Meaning and Madness: The Turn of the Screw
o The fundamental metaphor of t
April 22, 2022
"If the letters' very resistance to daylight, to transparency and to meaning, is indicative of their participation in an unconscious economy; if, as signifiers par excellence of that unconscious economy, they can only be meaningful through their own censorship, signify through their own blacking-out; if the very story of the unconscious is a story of the circulation of undecipherable letters—then the crucial theoretical question for both literature and psychoanalysis, for the reader of textual letters as well as for the interpreter of the text of the unconscious, would be the following one: how can unreadable letters be read, even as they demand to be read as unreadable?"
—V. The Scene of Writing: Purloined Letters
—V. The Scene of Writing: Purloined Letters
June 18, 2025
Necessary reading to accompany The Turn of the Screw. The kind of criticism that makes you breathless to read.
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