Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers

Georgia Rose Phillips

For a long time, I have been rereading John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” in the way I occasionally reread certain poems—feeling as if the lines I have committed to memory have become the echo of my own emotion. When I experience grief, I often hear the line from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Desire”, “Say the stars have never learned / to say goodbye” (99). I see a muted twinkle against a stretch of navy and feel the pang of the star’s condition of being permanently suspended outside the redemptive thralls of language.

When I first learnt how to create internet bookmarks, a link to Ashbery’s “Syringa” became a permanent fixture above the search bar. Ever since, the shortcut to the poem looms like one of Harjo’s stars, glinting above my internet excursions, its presence a poignant reminder of the hold the poem has on my imagination. As I click through the vast web of pages, the promise of the reward of a reread is always close by, haunting.

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The Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu, who emigrated to the US in 1973, wrote in Rereading (1993) that when he thinks of rereading, he finds himself returning to the metaphor of haunting (xi). [i] He describes how certain texts linger and lay “strong” and “mysterious claims” over our “memory, attention, and imagination” (xi). He also explores how we as readers, who become entranced by certain works and enter in loops of iterative return, also haunt texts.

Călinescu’s discussion of rereading as a form of haunting makes me think of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) and the ghost of Hamlet’s father he mentions throughout. Derrida describes rereading Marx’s The Manifesto of the Communist Party, something he confesses he hasn’t done in decades. In returning to this work, he finds a ghost waiting there “raising the curtain” (2). As he elaborates on the paradoxical nature of this spectre, he describes it as a “non-object” and “non-present present”, “this being-there of an absent or departed one” (5). Derrida then goes on to draw on the return of the ghost of the deceased King in Hamlet to elaborate on how the spectre is not only a manifestation of, or return of the past, but also, the appearance of a lost future (10).

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When I think of the phantom that haunts contemporary reading practices, I think of the slow and thorough practice of rereading. Jon Thiem describes in “Reading and Rereading” how the reading culture of the present is one of “scan, skim, and browse, forward and delete” in which the “notion of sustained reading seems archaic” (166).

This method of swift and singular reading, however, wasn’t always the dominant way to engage with a work. In “Toward a History of Reading”, Robert Darnton describes the period prior to 1750 as one of “intensive reading”. The scarcity of books meant people reread the ones they owned (91). Darnton outlines that by the 1800s people (mostly men) were reading “extensively” (91). The increase in quantity and availability of books—afforded by technological advancements of the printing press—precipitated new reading patterns. A new approach to consuming literature emerged: one that entailed a singular read of a work followed by a reach for something new and previously unencountered. [ii] Reading replaced rereading. This new mode of engaging with literature reinforced Freud’s belief outlined in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) that “novelty is always the condition of enjoyment” (35).

In the contemporary literary and academic marketplace, where books flood through publishing houses at an almost unreadable pace, it is easy to see how reading has grown increasingly divorced from its precursor: rereading. The market forces driving late capitalism reinforce this approach of reading rapidly once, and then, never again.

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Oscar Schwartz in his essay “Against Rereading” in The Paris Review draws on a claim Barthes makes in S/Z (1970): that rereading is “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society” (15). Barthes describes our society as one that would “have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed” to swiftly replace it with another (15). He characterises rereading as not just a method in opposition to market forces but also as what allows the reader to discover the plurality of meanings within a text (16). Rereading, in Barthes’s mind, enables the reader to move beyond being a passive consumer of a work to become an active participant in mediating the meaning process (16).

Schwartz in “Against Rereading” argues that if we were to extend Barthes’s fanaticism for rereading to its limits, the “ideal literary culture” would involve one singular book that is compulsively reread. This hypothetical culture reminds Schwartz of the reading practices he witnessed in his youth at the Orthodox synagogue. He recollects how the “old men would finish reading the final portion of the Torah—with Moses standing on the mountain overlooking the Promised Land—and then start again at the Beginning.”

Schwartz draws attention to how the time-hardened practice of rereading underpins Abrahamic religions. In doing so, he argues rereading is inseparable from the process of “reaffirming tradition”. In Schwartz’s mind, the cultural habit of rereading is less of a “balm to society’s cultural decline” and more a “conservative pursuit”. He also highlights canon formation’s dependence upon rereading—thereby, explaining Harold Bloom’s rampant fanaticism for it.

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When I think of the phantoms that haunt my rereadings of Ashbery’s “Syringa”, I think of Orpheus and Eurydice at the centre of the poem, and the imminent sense of tragedy that towers over the work. As I wade through the poem’s looming sense of inevitability, I hold my breath as Orpheus, again, enters the nether world, the impending fatal error, haunting. However, it is not Ashbery’s line, “Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade” that axes the frozen sea within. It is the unbearable fatalism of the line that follows: “She would have even if he hadn’t turned around”.

References

Ashbery, John. “Syringa.” Poetry, vol. 130, no. 1, April 1977, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33626/syringa.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Blackwell, 1974.

Călinescu, Matei. Rereading. Yale University Press, 1993.

Cannon, Christopher. “The Art of Rereading.” ELH [Baltimore], vol. 80, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 401–25, https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2013.0011.

Darnton, Robert. “Toward a History of Reading.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), vol. 13, no. 4, 1989, pp. 86–102. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40257949.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.

Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, translated by James Stratchey, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955, pp. 7-64.

Harjo, Joy. “Desire.” Ploughshares, vol. 15, no. 4, 1989, pp. 99–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40380850.

“Matei Călinescu.” New York Review of Books, https://www.nyrb.com/collections/matei-calinescu.

Schwartz, Oscar. “Against Rereading.” The Paris Review, September 4, 2024, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/04/against-rereading/

Thiem, Jon. “Reading and Rereading: A Twenty-First Century Perspective.” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, vol. 59, 2013, p. 163-193. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/615136.

The series

Blog 1: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/in-praise-of-rereading/

Blog 2: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/enter-the-ghost-exit-the-ghost/

Blog 3: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/luminous-with-manifold-illusion/

About the author

Georgia is an award-winning writer who publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, literary criticism and academic scholarship. She is the author of The Bearcat (Picador, 2025) and is a Lecturer, Creative Writing at Adelaide University. She holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales and is currently working on her second novel and a book-length collection of poems.

About the image

A photograph taken by Katia Nazarenko and uploaded as a free-to-use image to Pexels. It is available here (https://www.pexels.com/photo/33451284) and used with thanks.