Imaginary Specters, Imagined Listeners: The Undecidable in Graham Swift's Tomorrow and Mothering Sunday

Abstract: This paper aims to investigate the possible connection between specters and silence in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016). In both novels, the protagonists predominantly speak in interior monologues, recounting the memories and secrets that haunt them, in what could be construed as an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of their past. The paper’s understanding of specters is based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), and the idea that specters - as figures that exist in states of in-between - disrupt not only temporality, but what we know to be true. Much like specters, the protagonists vacillate between states, neither speaking nor remaining silent, as they address absent or imagined listeners. This undecidability leaves one to wonder if their ghosts are - or ever can be - truly exorcised.