Spectrality as ethical gift and the chance for justice: Living on and dispossession in James Joyce's "The Dead" and John Banville's Snow

Abstract

This essay will explore the theoretical pertinence of the spectre in modern and contemporary Irish fiction as dislocating the sense of history as the modality of the present. I argue for the intertextuality residing between James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and John Banville’s novel Snow not on the basis of a model of artistic derivativeness or disavowal, but as part of a dynamic of spectral inheritance that forces us to redefine notions of epistemic and ontological closure. Banville’s image of being a “survivor” of Joyce provides me with the analytical apparatus to explore how survivability crucially depends on giving the past its futural chance. It is my argument that these conditions of living on and reckoning with the ghost in Joyce and Banville put in place a utopic and an-archic consideration of justice, which can ultimately only be given (over) to the ghostly other within the self.