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)ģ 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. The ghost challenges the idea of linear time (and therefore clearly defined notions of ‘period’) it does not belong properly to any given space-time frame but poses a threshold between frames. 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’. (Guérin 25)Ģ 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: In her review on its French release, Marie-Anne Guérin, in Cahiers du Cinéma, pointed out the theme of the ‘lost tradition’:Ĭe 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). 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. 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. that make it possible for ghosts to return’ (Guidée 12–13). 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 . . . 1 As many commentators have noticed (Audeguy 7–13), modernity has a special relation to spectrality and ghosts.