Afterword: Prosopopoeia or, Witnessing

Perhaps, in conclusion, it is necessary to shift our ground, as does Hamlet when faced with the invisible ubiquity of the ghost. Nowhere as such, and yet everywhere; and yet everywhere different. Attuning ourselves to the possibility of spectral analysis, forcing ourselves to confront the nothing-and-yet-not-nothing and the neither-nowhere-nor-not-nowhere that nonetheless leaves a trace in passing and which has such a material effect — and what, after all, is ideology for example except the experience of this invisible nothing that we call beliefs, values, ideas? — we may perhaps discern a trembling of sorts. Whether we speak of ‘the gothic’, citation, ideology, or modalities of allusion and representation, if we seek to address ghosts, haunting, spectrality and the textual apparitions to which this book has sought to draw its readers’ attention, then we need to acknowledge that we are responding to what has already come and gone — and which has returned again. As we intimated at the conclusion of the Introduction, it is thus a matter of reading as response, response as responsibility, and responsibility as witnessing. The experience of the spectral is, in being both responsive and responsible, the experience of being touched through reading by that which is other, that which is prosopopoeic: ‘a voice or a face of the absent’, as J. Hillis Miller has it, ‘the inanimate, or the dead’.1