HOUSMAN'S SPECTRAL SHROPSHIRE

Extract

The fictional setting of the “Shropshire” of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1894) is well known. He himself admitted to hardly having visited the county before the publication of his cycle of poems and the topography of the county in verse and actuality are often two different things. For instance, Hughley, whose steeple in the poems is a “far-known sign,” as Housman's brother Laurence discovered on a post-publication visit, is located in a valley and the remarkable spire turns out to be squat rather than soaring (Burnett, Letters 1: 90). The particular form of unreality that will be the subject of this paper is not, however, the physical backdrop of Housman's poems, imaginary or otherwise. Rather I would like to focus on the way in which the imaginative universe of Housman is populated by figures who challenge our assumptions about the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead. We might say that I will be concerned not with the epistemology of Housman's Shropshire but with its ontology, or perhaps, to use a term of Derrida's, with its “hauntology” (Specters 10, 51, 161). Indeed, my suggestion will be that far from being an untrue or fictional world, the phantasmal figures of Housman's Shropshire articulate that reality that is named, in the late work of Jacques Derrida, as the spectral. My essay will elaborate the question of the spectral as an interplay between the poems of Housman and the philosophical meditations of Derrida.