“Let me go, if you want me to let you in”: The Ghostly
Circle in Caryl Phillips‟s The Lost Child Cover Image

“Let me go, if you want me to let you in”: The Ghostly Circle in Caryl Phillips‟s The Lost Child
“Let me go, if you want me to let you in”: The Ghostly Circle in Caryl Phillips‟s The Lost Child

Author(s): Svetlana Stefanova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: UNIVERSITATEA »ȘTEFAN CEL MARE« SUCEAVA
Keywords: Caryl Phillips; The Lost Child; circularity; spectrality; Gothic; Wuthering Heights

Summary/Abstract: The present article argues that the examination of the significance of Gothic motifs in Caryl Phillips‘s The Lost Child (2015) reveals the author‘s approach to unresolved individual and collective traumas that haunt his protagonists, but also his texts. The intricate interaction between the circular structure of the novel and the theme of historical and generational cyclicity requires a special attention to the journey trope and its spatial markers. The title of this essay is borrowed from Chapter III of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights (1847), The Lost Child’s canonical intertext, in which Catherine‘s ghost appears at the window and begs Lockwood to let her in. Drawing on some concepts developed by Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1993), the essay explores the meaning and function of spectrality and how it relates to circularity and to Phillips‘s commitment to justice, which goes beyond remembering the ―lost children‖ of the past, to actually let them in the present.