T.J.Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge, U.K.

:
Cambridge University Press, 1994): pp. 115117
If The Turn of the Screw is concerned with slippages and turns of
meaning, it is also deeply preoccupied with gaps and voids: James wrote in
his Preface that the values of the story were positively all blanks. Shlomith
Rimmon has argued that The Turn of the Screw constructs its ambiguity
around a central informational gap. But this notion of an absent core, a
single and central enigma, seems to secure its lucidity by avoiding any
explication of the teeming voids which haunt The Turn of the Screw. Few
fictions deploy such extensive and disparate lacunae, and The Turn of the
Screw uses its blanks to undermine all attempts to establish relations and to
join references into a coherent pattern. One could even argue that the tale
blanks its overt blanks. Blankley is the name of a country house in The
Wheel of Time. In the Turn of the Screw, by contrast, the revealing blank is
elided and contracted into Bl. . .y, a place name as suggestive as
Paramore, though a more reticently monosyllabic one. The Turn of the
Screw is repeatedly concerned with the act of telling. More often than not,
however, its predicament is that of not being able to tell. Fragmented and
vestigial, the existing text looks like the ruined remains of a fuller story. The
introductory chapter of The Turn of the Screw begins just after a story has
been told and ends just before a story is about to begin. It occupies a space
between two acts of telling, framing and mediating a narrative which, as
Douglas points out, takes up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner,
begun, and which ends in the air, with a death whose consequences are not
registered in the narrative of the governess, except in the sense that her
narrative is the effect of that death. The formal beginning and ending of the
introductory chapter and of the main narrative do not conclude with actual,
absolute, chronological beginnings and endings: they are, as Christine
Brooke-Rose puts it, truncated, at both ends.
The frame chapter serves to mediate a further mediation, since it
seems that the events at Bly do not constitute a complete and discrete story
so much as a border between a past defined in terms of social relations and a
future made up of literary or textual relations. Miles and Flora are passed
from their dead parents to their disappearing uncle and on to Quint and
Jessel, who die to make way for an evanescent nursemaid, a temporary
school, Mrs Grose and the governess herself. Some time after the events of
the main narrative the governess tells her story directly to Douglas. The story
is subsequently written down by the governess and sent to Douglas before
her death. Douglas reads the governesss narrative to the circle gathered in
the old house and in turn transmits it, before his own death, to the narrator of
the introductory chapter, who finally makes an exact transcript of the
manuscript. The events at Bly thus form the mid- point in a sequence of
transmissions, each of which begins and ends in death or absence, all of
which lead away from genetic sources and reproductive pairs to single
parental substitutes and from primary spoken narratives to written, read and
copied ones.
In Harold Bloom, ed., Henry James, Blooms Major Short Story Writers (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 2001)

Teahan, Sheila, The Literal Turn of the Figurative Screw, The

Arizona Quarterly, Autumn 2006, 62, 3
As T.J. Lusting demonstrates in his fine book on James and the ghostly, there
exists a longstanding association between ghosts and writing, and especially
between ghosts and figurative language. The ghost undoes the distinctions
between present and absent, present and past, and literal and figurative,
which is also to say that it disrupts the temporal and ontological categories
constitutive of the sign. Numerous philosophers have aligned ghosts
specifically with the seductive and disruptive power of metaphor. (p. 67)

Shoshana Felman, Turning the Screw of Interpretation, (Yale

French Studies 55/56, 1977)
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.
The storys origin is therefore not assigned to any one voice which would
assume responsibility or the tale, but to the deferred action of a sort of
echoing effect, produced after the fact by voices which themselves re-
produce previous voices. It is as though the frame itself could only multiply
itself, repeat itself: as though, in its infinite reproduction of the very act of
narration, the frame could only be its own self-repetition, its own self-framing.

A narrative frame which thus incarnates the very principle of repetition of the
story it contains, and, through that repetition, situates both the loss of the
storys origin ad the storys origin as its own loss, is clearly not a simple
backdrop, staging, from the circumstancial outside, the inside of the storys
content, but constitutes rather a complication, a problematization of the
relationship itself between the inside and the outside of the textual space.