Ghosts in the Machine: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and a Hauntology of the Unpublished in the Born-Digital Literary Archive

Abstract

This paper establishes a new critical paradigm for the study of contemporary literary archives by arguing that the unpublished, born-digital draft-conceived as a Derridean spectre-fundamentally destabilises the ontological security of the published literary work. It posits that the digital archive's exhaustive preservation of compositional artefacts (deleted passages, fragmented files, abandoned versions) does not simply expand the genetic dossier but inaugurates a hauntological textual condition. This condition demands an ethics of spectral literacy. Through a theoretical case study of Margaret Atwood's novel, The Testaments (2019), this research performs a spectral collation—a critical reading practice that attends to how the published text itself enacts hauntological dynamics through its themes of suppressed narratives, structural silences, and preoccupation with documentation. The analysis demonstrates that these textual features anticipate and mirror the archival condition, revealing how the published work is always already haunted by what it cannot contain. The paper concludes that literary scholarship must abandon the editorial dream of a clean text and instead develop protocols for engaging the archive as a haunted system, where meaning is generated through the fraught dialogue between the realised and the repressed.