Spectral presences and encrypted absences: Hauntology in the short fiction of A. S. Byatt

This article examines the hauntological dimensions of A. S. Byatt’s short fiction collections Sugar and Other Stories (1992) and Little Black Book of Stories (2005) , arguing that her work constitutes a sustained meditation on how the past persists as an intimate yet uncanny presence within contemporary experience. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, Abraham and Torok’s theories of the phantom and psychic crypt and Gordon’s sociological framework of haunting, this study demonstrates how Byatt’s narratives explore a spectral logic that disrupts boundaries between presence/absence, past/present and living/dead. The discussion maps how Byatt’s spectral poetics operate across personal, domestic and cultural registers, depicting spectrality as intersubjective contagion, material memory and encrypted loss. Byatt’s hauntological aesthetic insists on the ongoing presence of ghosts, framing literature itself as a spectral medium.