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Études britanniques contemporaines
Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines
58 | 2020
“Literature’s exception(s)”, E.M. Forster, V. Woolf
Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End
La spectralité dans Howards End de James Ivory
Jean-François Baillon
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/9091
DOI: 10.4000/ebc.9091
ISSN: 2271-5444
Publisher
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
Electronic reference
Jean-François Baillon, « Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End », Études britanniques contemporaines
[Online], 58 | 2020, Online since 01 March 2020, connection on 23 April 2020. URL : http://
journals.openedition.org/ebc/9091 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.9091
This text was automatically generated on 23 April 2020.
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Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International.Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 1
Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards
End
La spectralité dans Howards End de James Ivory
Jean-François Baillon
1 As many commentators have noticed (Audeguy 7–13), modernity has a special relation
to spectrality and ghosts. According to Raphaëlle Guidée, the spectrality of modernity
has something to do with the ‘disturbing effects of the return of a lost tradition’, as well
as with ‘the invention of recording techniques . . . that make it possible for ghosts to
return’ (Guidée 12–13). As a filmic adaptation of a modernist novel that deals with
tradition as one of its main subjects, James Ivory’s Howards End invites viewings that
pay attention to the importance of haunting, despite the fact that strictly speaking the
plot does not revolve around a literal ghost story. But then, was there ever such a thing
as a literal ghost story worthy of the name? Given Ivory’s lasting interest in the theme
of tradition and in the traces of the past in his Indian films and his particular taste for
writers like Henry James, whose work is pervaded with the ghostly, we shouldn’t be
surprised to find that spectrality is also relevant to an analysis of Howards End. In her
review on its French release, Marie-Anne Guérin, in Cahiers du Cinéma, pointed out the
theme of the ‘lost tradition’:
Ce qui habite tout le film (et le cinéma de Ivory), c’est le sentiment doux-amer,
parfois voluptueux, (pas du côté de la mélancolie mais plutôt de celui de
l’anamnèse), incarné et symbolisé par la somptueuse présence augurale de Vanessa
Redgrave, d’appartenir à un monde sur le point de disparaître et d’arpenter des
territoires qui n’en gardent pas la mémoire (telle l’oublieuse terre indienne de
Shakespeare Wallah ou du très beau Autobiography of a Princess). (Guérin 25)
2 As to Belén Vidal, in the remarkable pages she devoted to Howards End in Figuring the
Past, she pointed out the presence of the ghostly and commented:
Ghosts sit uncomfortably in the modern imagination, yet they are not simply a
throwback to the past, but the trace of chronology confounded—time out of joint:
‘ghosts are anachronism par excellence, the appearance of something in a time in
which they clearly do not belong’. The ghost challenges the idea of linear time (and
therefore clearly defined notions of ‘period’); it does not belong properly to any
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 2
given space-time frame but poses a threshold between frames. We can liken the
ghost to the figural as a blur in the picture that marks the eruption of the purely
visible into the orderly space of the discursive. (Vidal 69)
3 The present paper will examine how some of the figures and concepts traditionally
associated with spectrality and ghosts can produce an interpretation of Ivory’s film. As
a retrospective representation of an age caught between forces of economic, social and
political change that one may describe as ‘modern’ and forces that looked back towards
a more ‘traditional’ vision of England, the film might have tended to blend them into
some indistinct notion of ‘the past’ that forms part of the general aesthetic definition of
so-called ‘heritage cinema’. However, as the preceding quotations suggest, there are
tensions within modernity as well as within the film itself. Our main hypothesis is that
an analysis of some of its main figures in terms of spectrality can bring to light some
interesting differences between the characters and the existential position they
embody. We will suggest that those characters most intimately associated with the
spectral challenge and unsettle a philosophy of presence and immediacy that is mainly
represented by the Wilcoxes, especially Henry.
4 Henry Wilcox appears to be the voice of a simple philosophy of the here and now: ‘no
time like the present’, he claims in answer to Margaret’s diplomatic attempts to start a
discussion about Leonard Bast after the wedding ceremony at Oniton Grange (1:31:33).
He is also a man of simple dichotomies and clear-cut definitions, as we can see from his
statements about the Schlegel sisters, opposing Helen’s vagaries (later, he will use the
word ‘madness’) to what he insists is Margaret’s matter-of-factness. ‘My Margaret, she
keeps her facts straight’, he muses. In spite of Margaret’s expression of doubt (‘What
facts are those, dear?’), he goes on: ‘Hm, about men and women and all that sort of
thing. Who is who and what is what’ (1:49:00–1:49:10). The editing—with the close-up
on the postcard that Margaret turns—and the focus on Margaret’s pensiveness
undermine the solidity of Henry’s position. He fails to perceive that Helen’s absence
haunts the scene.
5 Henry is a man of the present moment. His relationship to the past is superficial, not
foundational, as in the scene of luncheon at Simpson’s, where he reminisces of his days
in the Orient in a way that only reinforces ethnic and cultural stereotypes—unless, as
we will discover later, it is a front for a more shameful past, what in Freudian theory is
called a ‘screen memory’, concealing the memory of his affair with Jacky (1:03:22–
1:03:45). Similarly, the portraits admired by Margaret on the walls of Oniton Grange—a
trope of patriotic cinema, as in the beginning of Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939)
—do not really connect Henry to the past: none of them are Wilcoxes (1:23:00–1:23:30).
Again, the conversations about Leonard’s plight reveal the same lack of depth of
temporal field. What was true about the Porphyrion yesterday (‘I’d advise him to clear
out of the Porphyrion with all possible speed’—56:04) is no longer true today (‘not a bad
business the Porphyrion’—1:12:02). Henry’s is what we might call a ‘presentist’
philosophy (Hartog 2003).
6 The episode of Jacky’s intrusion, however, shatters the solidity of his position and
reminds us of the way the Freudian uncanny was applied by T.J. Lustig to situations in
the fiction of Henry James:
In her analysis of this scene [from The Ambassadors] Ruth Bernard Yeazell detects
forces which recall those at work in the Freudian uncanny. Through ‘the inevitable
surfacing of suppressed facts’, Strether joins other characters in James’s later work
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 3
who must ‘confront what in some part of themselves they have long since known’.
(Lustig 195)
7 In the same way, the motif of the English country house itself undergoes a process of
defamiliarisation: it becomes Unheimlich. In filming the house, Ivory actually uses some
of the tropes of the ‘haunted house’ in gothic horror films, like: the shot on a window
from outside, the long shot on the house, the empty dark room, the crone (here, Miss
Avery), the sound of thumping coming from upstairs, the shadows on the walls. Similar
devices are used in classic films featuring haunted houses like The Innocents (Jack
Clayton, 1961), The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), The Amityville Horror (Stuart
Rosenberg, 1979), The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980), Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1998), The
Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001). These shots both objectify and denaturalize our
relationship to the house, raising issues of property, landscape and representation as
well as what makes a house a ‘home’. Now the notion of Unheimlichkeit used in gothic
studies to analyse horror has been theorised by Freud in a famous 1919 essay from such
stock situations and themes as, precisely the haunted house, a place both familiar and
unfamiliar, which is precisely the point made by Margaret when she visits the place the
first time. During her visit at the Imperial and West African Rubber Company, she
claims, ‘I can hardly wait to see it [Howards End] although I almost feel I have’ (1:15:17).
If Howards End can be said to be Unheimlich, isn’t it because its ‘homeliness’ has been
made problematic but also because Ivory’s strategies as a filmmaker rely on the strange
familiarity of the place?
8 ‘Did you take her for a spook’, Dolly muses about Miss Avery (1:19:56), thus explicitly
reinforcing the network of associations with the gothic that surrounds the scene of
Margaret’s visit to Howards End. ‘I think about my house a great deal’, Ruth Wilcox
confesses to Margaret Schlegel as their friendship gets thicker (33:43). This makes
Howards End a haunting house as much as a haunted house—perhaps like most haunted
houses, drawing everyone to them and creating lasting memories. Ruth claims that she
can’t help thinking about it (33:43), but she is not the only one. Howards End becomes
an obsession also for Margaret. Ruth Wilcox, however, is the first ghost in the film. In
the opening sequence she is filmed as if she were truly a ghostly presence. In twilight
atmosphere, she walks outdoors past the windows through which life can be glimpsed
in warm colours (2:20–3:27). This pale woman remains unnoticed by masters and
servants alike. Relying on Deleuze, Belén Vidal writes, ‘As if through a crack in the
crystal, the eye crosses over to the side of the ghost’ (Vidal 76). Ruth’s position defines
her as a spectre in Derrida’s sense: ‘fantôme ou revenant, sensible insensible, visible
invisible, le spectre d’abord nous voit. De l’autre côté de l’oeil, effet de visière, il nous
regarde avant même que nous ne le voyions ou que nous ne voyions tout court’
(Derrida 165). ‘Spook’, according to the etymology provided by the O.E.D. on line, is a
word of Low German origin, and its slang U.S. meaning, largely adopted in Britain as
well, also means ‘a spy’—thus confirming the Derridean analysis of the spectre as look.
Vidal also analyses the scene in terms of ‘anamorphosis of space into time’ (Vidal 76).
The analysis of this early scene by Marie-Anne Guérin also points out some details that
express a certain sensitivity to Ivory’s creation of a mythical synthesis of art and
nature, in fact a pure image:
le film s’ouvre, en amont du roman, sur le frôlement au crépuscule de la traîne
d’une robe claire qui trace son sillage dans l’herbe sombre et dense. Lentement la
caméra s’écarte, laissant le champ libre à la silhouette élégante et civilisée de
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 4
Mrs. Wilcox, tout droit échappée d’une peinture de Sargent, et qui semble naître de
ce contact avec son jardin, en être une émergence. (Guérin 24)
9 Guérin even sees a pale dress where in fact Vanessa Redgrave wears a dark one:
contrary to what happens with the governess in Clayton’s The Innocents, her attire in
Howards End changes from dark to light as she accomplishes her journey. In later scenes
of the film, Ruth keeps reminding us of a living dead. Her pallor, the frailty of her voice,
her outmoded views on suffrage—every detail makes her a figure from the past. Ruth’s
whiteness can be construed as an element, among others, of her spectrality. Her
relationship to (black-and-white) photography is another. She is the only character in
the film who handles a framed photograph of relatives (27:57), thus firmly establishing
a contrast with the former tradition of portrait painting. Portrait photography is a
memento, that connects Ruth to a world of likenesses that, in the Edwardian ear, had
actually superseded portrait painting in the middle classes. The casting of Vanessa
Redgrave as Ruth Wilcox caused James Ivory to comment, in conversation with Robert
Emmet Long: ‘Vanessa, on the one hand, is very real as a flesh-and-blood person; she
herself is very solid. But, on the other hand, her manner and her acting style have an
evanescence that suggested the idea of this semimythic person. In my mind there was
no one else who could have played that part. I never thought of anybody else’ (Long
224).
10 According to Derrida, spectrality is also about what he calls, after Didi-Huberman,
‘heterochrony’. This is why, as a ‘trace that marks the present with its absence in
advance’, the spectre accomplishes a ‘deconstructive logic’: ‘un spectre, c’est à la fois
visible et invisible, à la fois phénoménal et non phénoménal: une trace qui marque
d’avance le présent de son absence. La logique spectrale est de facto une logique
déconstructrice’ (Derrida and Stiegler 131). Again, the opening scene of the film offers
exactly that. The first shot, with the camera following Ruth walking in the grass,
literally films the making of a trace (1:07–1:37), and the scene ends with Ruth leaving
the field of the camera on the right still unnoticed from those inside the house, like a
prolepsis of her death (3:30). However, heterochrony in Howards End is not restricted to
Ruth. Leonard, for one, is a figure that achieves much in terms of the deconstruction of
the present of the film. One early clue is given during the piece of nonsensical dialogue
with the Schlegels concerning the timing of his ‘afternoon call’ (51:00–52:00): Leonard’s
subjectivity troubles the linearity of the chronological narrative more than once in the
course of the film, while it simultaneously also troubles the apparent simplicity of
diegetic space. In an early instance of this, while Jacky starts undressing in the next
room, his reading from his book in voiceover conjures up a double of himself in an
imaginary landscape that replaces the literal space of the sitting-room thanks to a
dissolve (24:42–25:22). In his commentary of Jean Mitry’s theory of cinema, Christian
Metz suggested that whereas the film as narrative is ‘always in the past’, the filmic
image is ‘always in the present’ (Metz 1986, 73). Whatever we think of this dichotomy, it
relies on two homogeneous strands that seem equally stable in their relationship to
time. It seems that one of the functions of the figure of Leonard in Howards End is
precisely to complicate this, just as he complicates filmic space. When exactly ‘is’ each
of the sequences ascribed to Leonard’s subjective narration? If we take the dream
sequence that precedes his decision to find Helen again (2:05:55–2:06:46), what we can
at least say is that it brings together visual and aural elements that bring the viewer
back in time to earlier parts of the film, thus disrupting the sense of ‘the present’ that
they may have if we follow Metz’s insight.
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 5
11 In the context of the present discussion, what is also very striking about Leonard is his
close connection to Ruth, first achieved through the walk-in-nature motif and the floral
motif. The daydreaming sequence at the Porphyrion (47:44–48:49), like the actual
dream sequence in the last part of the film, create breaks in the treatment of space
(with openings into Leonard’s mental spaces) that are suggestive of simultaneous
presence and absence of the character in an uncanny space. In the second sequence
(Leonard’s dream), the use of shots of Helen based on the ‘Music and Meaning’ scene
combined with chords from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony conjure up an impression of ‘
déjà vu’. This is a feeling that Freud identified as a variety of the uncanny, as Nicholas
Royle pointed out in one chapter of his own study (Royle 172–86). Royle brings up into
the discussion the concept of ‘déjà raconté’. In his film of Howards End, Ivory multiplies
shots or scenes that create that feeling of ‘déjà vu’ or ‘déjà raconté’: the shot on the fire
to destroy a letter (45:32; 1:39:13) or the two family reunions (42:44–45:44; 2:15:39–
2:16:59). The story of Henry’s relationship to Jacky is told twice (by Henry, reluctantly,
to Margaret, then by Leonard, with more details, to Helen) (1:36:20–1:37:50; 1:39:40–
1:40:20). So is the story of the pig’s teeth (36:34–36:58; 1:19:27–1:19:48). The
chronological linearity of the film is thus again severely punctured. In a film that is so
insistent—visually and aurally—on the presence of clocks, such a disruption of linearity
is indicative of the deconstructive power of spectral figures. More generally, linear
time is often disrupted in the film through the agency of Leonard: sometimes in a comic
way through the misunderstanding over his visit to the Schlegel sisters, sometimes
through the use of prolepsis when he caresses the hilt of the sword that will later kill
him (52:40). More spectacular ways are the dream that has just been mentioned, or the
daydream at the Porphyrion. These are instances when narrative time as well as
diegetic time seem ‘out of joint’. Continuity editing is misleadingly used, together with
the voiceover and the music, so as to produce discontinuity.
12 What brings the figures of Ruth, Helen and Leonard (and to some extent Margaret)
together is the use of properties of the filmic discourse to suggest that they form part
of a use of the spectral as an allegory of cinema itself. 1 The most obvious one is the use
of dissolves. This mode of presence/absence occurs in a striking manner in the opening
sequence to turn the figure of Ruth into an elusive, fleeting presence. The same can be
said about Leonard in the daydreaming sequence at the Porphyrion while he peruses a
book of astronomy. It is also an editing device used in the section concerning the
reception of Helen’s postcards. Famous texts about experiences of early cinema connect
it to ghosts and spectrality. Thus Maxim Gorky in ‘Last Night I was in the Kingdom of
Shadows’ (Chanan 33; Banda and Moure 48) or Jules Claretie in ‘Le spectre des
vivants’ (1896): ‘ce merveilleux Cinématographe, qui nous rend le spectre des vivants,
nous donnera-t-il, en nous permettant d’en conserver le fantôme, et les gestes, et le son
de voix même, la douceur et les caresses des chers êtres disparus?’ (Banda and
Moure 43). In his study on the uncanny, Nicholas Royle comments upon Tom Gunning’s
remark about ‘the fundamentally uncanny quality of photography, its capture of a
spectre-like double’ (Royle 78). Margaret is somehow a double of Ruth, a Dopplegänger,
often framed in a way that suggests a negative mirror image, as in the trip to Harrod’s,
shot inside a carriage that reminds us of a camera obscura (34:20) No wonder Miss Avery
mistook her for Ruth, finding that she had ‘her way of walking’ (1:18:31).
13 During a large segment of the film Helen’s absence is a theme in dialogue and gives rise
to a succession of shots that imply that she is nevertheless much present. Her postcards
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 6
are handled by several characters (Tibby, Margaret, Aunt Juley) and the close-ups on
them create a complex interplay between words, images and frame (1:18:44; 1:49:23;
1:49:38; 1:49:45). The repetition of a musical motif on the harp emphasises the
evanescent quality of Helen’s communication at this point, especially as Margaret
comments to Annie, ‘and no letter’ (1:49:39), pointing out the telegraphic brevity of the
messages, as it were. Where is Helen exactly? She constantly moves from one location
to another, as we can read or hear. The very form of the postcard suggests a time-gap
between emission and reception that emphasises the elusiveness of her location. The
images on the postcards refer to standardised representations of the places where she
was, as opposed to the filmic image that captures the presence, or at least the trace of
the presence, of the actors on screen. ‘I just can’t feel that Helen’s really alive’ (1:49:53),
Margaret comments to Tibby at Oxford, again giving away the function of the postcards
as signifiers of Helen’s problematic ontological stability.
14 Other strategies sometimes complement this one, like shooting Helen through window
panes that reflect the space off camera (1:14:12), thus suggesting the equivalent of
superimpositions. The use at this point in the film (just after the quarrel caused by
Henry’s casual remark that the Porphyrion is ‘not a bad business’) of the harp motif
that will reappear over the postcard sequence can be seen as proleptic. The window
pane can be interpreted as what Christian Metz, after Marc Vernet, calls a
‘diegeticization of the apparatus’. ‘Occasionally, Metz explains, film reproduce more or
less faithfully, in the stories they relate, certain elements or characteristics of the
cinema or of its equipment, which as a result find themselves to be part of the diegesis’
(Metz 2015, 55). In the present case, it is as if instead of using an actual dissolve or
superimposition to signify Helen’s disappearance, Ivory was creating its equivalent by
using diegetic elements provided by the setting. The result is very much the same:
Helen is no longer quite there, she is absent and present, already spirited away by her
secret life abroad. In Vie des fantômes, Jean-Louis Leutrat analyses dissolves and
superimpositions as a figure of cinema in terms of haunting: ‘le fondu enchaîné est
mouvement, donc transformation donnée à voir in progress, moins une figure de
l’absence que celle d’une apparition/disparition, en cela purement cinématographique:
il n’y a rien de plus à voir que ce qui est montré’ (Leutrat 124–25). Marc Vernet explains
how the ‘trick’ of superimposition reveals what cinema usually conceals, i.e. its
fundamental operation of melding two still images into the illusion of a moving one:
si, du côté de la fiction, la surimpression rend visible l’invisible, du côté du discours,
ce trucage fait aussi voir ce que le cinéma d’ordinaire dissimule: son opération
fondamentale qui consiste à fondre dans le mouvement (mouvement de la pellicule
dans l’appareil, mouvement du représenté sur l’écran) deux photogrammes
distincts et fixes qu’elle lie en un autre ensemble, fluide. (Vernet 65)
15 Thus it is that in Ivory’s filmic version of Howards End, characters who give rise to the
production of figures of the ghostly and the spectral also invite an interpretation in
terms of reflexivity. Indeed their association with dissolves and superimpositions
foregrounds a degree of complicity with the deconstructive potential of the cinematic
apparatus: dissolves give away the artifice on which the illusion of presence maintained
by a movie show is actually based. Insofar as the cinematic image can paradoxically be
seen as a disappearing apparition (and vice-versa), it contradicts the certainties voiced
by Henry Wilcox at several key moments in the film in terms of solidity, presence and
coincidence to oneself that have been briefly established earlier. Besides, self-
awareness is a process that Henry seems to refuse rather than welcome, and the
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 7
general thrust of the plot suggests that he is an agent of forces that resist what in
Freudian terms could be seen as a ‘return of the repressed’—here, his own shameful
past, but also perhaps the practical consequences of Ruth’s decision to will her house to
Margaret. In gothic studies, the uncanny is often seen as a manifestation of that return,
taking the shape of doubles, ghosts or monsters as its vehicle.
16 There is even more than that, as Ivory’s film subtly suggests that its characters and
situations are no more than the passing and fleeting projections of an artificial ‘mega-
narrator’—that ultimate level of analysis of the narrative function that André
Gaudreault posits as a necessary to understand the structure of the film (Gaudreault
109). These are moments of the film that can be analysed as metafilmic representations
of pre-cinema and/or early cinema. The gesture of flipping a postcard is reminiscent of
a device known as the thaumatrope, featured for instance in Christopher Nolan’s The
Prestige (2006). When she visits Henry at the Imperial and West African Rubber
Company, Margaret dances with him and Charles looks at them through a vertical slit
that is reminiscent of another pre-cinema device called the ‘zoetrope’. This suggestion
is reinforced by the repeated presence in the field of the camera of a lamp in the shape
of such a device. Lastly, the Basts’ place is also, twice, associated with the ‘flicker’ of
early cinema shows, due to the intermittent light coming through the window as trains
are passing nearby during the lovemaking scene and again during the nightmare scene.
There is in fact a strong suggestion of an analytic deconstruction of the cinematic
experience in all three cases: it is as if Ivory was using this effect to undermine the
illusion of reality that he is simultaneously creating, in a kind of filmic equivalent of
Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt or estrangement effect (understood as reflexive
devices used in the theatre to produce intellectual understanding rather than emotion
or empathy). As Christophe Gelly also convincingly demonstrates in his paper, the use
of slow motion and fades to black, among other stylistic irregularities within a
relatively classical style, can also be seen as a departure from narrative transparency
that signals the artificiality of Ivory’s fictional constructs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In the way it stages the departure of intruders while the more legitimate occupants of a house
remain, the last sequence of Ivory’s Howards End bears some similarities with the ending of
Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001). In the two films, the intruders leave in a car that
somehow represents impermanence while those who stay are associated with spectrality and a
more lasting relationship to time and place that some may call tradition. The repressed truths
(Henry’s past, Ruth’s burnt note) have been unveiled and children can now face the outside world
without fear. All is not as simple as that however, as some characters in Ivory’s film do not quite
belong in the pattern: Henry Wilcox, throughout the film, has been a figure of the forces of
modern rationality that have no clue when they are confronted with the pictures on a book of
theosophy. The question he asks Margaret will have no answer but as a question it may well be
indicative of a slight change of direction: perhaps self-doubt, as a trace of the power of the
uncanny or deconstruction, has begun to unsettle his certainties, based on simple dichotomies
Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 8 and tautologies. The last image of the film is, after all, a fade to black: on the black screen that replaces the bright picture of a pastoral England, anyone is free to project their own answers, as if spectres had the last word, for, as Derrida wrote in Spectres de Marx, ‘Le spectre, c’est aussi, entre autres choses, ce qu’on imagine, ce qu’on croit voir et qu’on projette: sur un écran imaginaire, là où il n’y a rien à voir’ (Derrida 165). Spectrality in Howards End undermines the simple readings of the film in terms of unproblematic interpretations of the conventions of the heritage film. Precisely because the spectral quality of some key characters and scenes, like that of the cinematic apparatus itself, elicits a problematic relationship to the present and the past, the so-called ‘aesthetics of display’ (Higson 172) encounter their limits. Instead what we have is both a quest for the conditions of visibility of the image and a move towards invisibility that invite us to look always further and deeper. This is how Ivory asserts the modernity of his own aesthetics, in terms that cannot be a mere repetition of the modernity of the literary source. As Jacques Rancière has forcefully argued, the respective histories of literature and cinema have resulted in divergent definition of what modernity entails (Rancière 145–163). The paradox is of course that one of the most haunting presences in the film is that of literature itself. The film is full of readers of books, newspapers and magazines and one of the strongest connections between Leonard and the Schlegel sisters is precisely their taste in music and literature—they all know Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by heart, for instance. As we have seen, it is actually the reading of literature that triggers some of the breaches of continuity that have been described earlier. Could it be that ultimately the haunting presence of texts—perhaps including Forster’s—is what gives Ivory’s film its own uncanny quality? AUDEGUY, Stéphane, ‘Avant-propos — Ce qui nous hante’, La Nouvelle Revue Française 602 (octobre 2012): 7–13. BANDA, Daniel and José MOURE, Le cinéma: naissance d’un art 1895–1920, Paris: Flammarion, 2008. CHANAN, Michael, The Dream That Kicks. The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. DERRIDA, Jacques, Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée, 1993. DERRIDA, Jacques and Bernard STIEGLER, Échographies de la télévision, Paris: Galilée, 1996. GAUDREAULT, André, Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit, Paris: Armand Colin, 1999. GUÉRIN, Marie-Anne, ‘Le collectionneur’, Cahiers du Cinéma 455/456 (mai 1992): 24–25. GUIDÉE, Raphaëlle, ‘La modernité hantée’, Otrante 25 (printemps 2009): 9–19. GUNNING, Tom, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny’, Fugitive Images, ed. Patrice PETRO, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995, 42–71. HARTOG, François, Les régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps, Paris: Le Seuil, 2003. HIGSON, Andrew, English Heritage, English Cinema. Costume Drama Since 1980, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. LEUTRAT, Jean-Louis, Vie des fantômes. Le fantastique au cinéma, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1995. LONG, Robert Emmet, Conversations with James Ivory. How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 2005. LUSTIG, T.J., Henry James and the Ghostly, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. METZ, Christian, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, II, Paris: Klinksieck, 1986. METZ, Christian, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film, New York: Columbia UP, 2015. Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020
Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 9 RANCIÈRE, Jacques, La fable cinématographique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001. ROYLE, Nicholas, The Uncanny, London and New York: Routledge, 2003. VERNET, Marc, Figures de l’absence. De l’invisible au cinéma, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1988. VIDAL, Belén, Figuring the Past, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. NOTES 1. There is also a network of terms linking together these characters with beings that belong to literature of the supernatural, from the ‘goblin’ of the ‘Music and Meaning’ lecture to the ‘witches and fairies’ of the ‘old superstitions’ loved by Margaret and the ‘spook’ that Dolly claims Miss Avery is. Concerning the word ‘goblin’, the first English translation (1850) of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848) read ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost. The ghost of Communism’. I thank Howard BOOTH for communicating this information to me. ABSTRACTS Despite its apparent claims to modernity in style and subject, James Ivory’s Howards End can be viewed in terms of a deconstructionist approach that pays attention to the presence of themes and figures of spectrality. First seen as an opposition between characters who embody contrasting existential attitudes, spectrality also—above all—governs their mode of presence and presentation on screen. Ultimately, this reveals Ivory’s subtle way to intimate the elusive nature of his own creation as mere projection. Malgré les apparences de modernité auxquelles peut prétendre l’adaptation du roman de E. M. Forster par James Ivory en raison de son style et de son sujet, il est possible de l’envisager d’un point de vue déconstructionniste qui prête attention à la présence de thèmes et de figures de la spectralité. D’abord considérée comme une opposition entre des personnages qui incarnent des attitudes existentielles contrastées, la spectralité gouverne également—surtout—leur mode de présence et de présentation à l’écran. En fin de compte, cela révèle la manière subtile qui est celle d’Ivory d’indiquer la nature fugace de sa propre création en tant que simple projection. INDEX Keywords: ghosts, spectrality, cinematic apparatus, Ivory (James), Derrida (Jacques), deconstruction, heterochrony Mots-clés: fantômes, spectralité, dispositif cinématographique, Ivory (James), Derrida (Jacques), déconstruction, hétérochronie Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020
Hauntings in James Ivory’s Howards End 10 AUTHOR JEAN-FRANÇOIS BAILLON Jean-François Baillon teaches English Studies and Film Studies at Bordeaux Montaigne University. Honorary President of SERCIA (Société d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Cinéma Anglophone), he has published articles on British cinema, British actors and actresses and ‘heritage cinema’ in collective books and in journals such as Mise au Point, Ellipses, CinémAction and Positif. Recent publications: J.-F. Baillon, ed., Howards End, Ellipses, 2019. J.-F. Baillon & Nicolas Labarre, eds., Intermedial Frankensteins (2020), forthcoming. Études britanniques contemporaines, 58 | 2020
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