Uncommon Prayer-Books
(Also: The Crack Down the Spine, Part 2)
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In the last essay, I remarked upon a paradox: M.R. James is thought of as ‘the father of the modern British ghost story’ (etc. etc.) and yet rarely wrote about ghosts as such. This is not a particularly original observation but it is one that remains, perhaps, under-theorised – something I hope to address. As also intimated last time, James is a fanatically material writer. His ghosts are not ghosts but – as we will see in the next essay – cats and carvings, monks and stair carpets, and many other material things besides.
This is not actually as puzzling as it might seem at first glance. In fact, the ‘ghost story’ as we know it does not restrict itself to stories about spectral figures of the dead. While we separate the uncanny story into various subsections based on content and/or tone – the vampire story, the Weird tale, etc – we also use the term ‘ghost story’ as an umbrella term. And this is a paradox which goes back to the start of the modern ghost story, itself an inherently modern category as we have already seen in the previous ‘Crack Down the Spine’ essay.
A story about a ghost is simply that: a story with a ghost in it. A Ghost Story is an example of a particular literary form, which may encompass many more kinds of entities than simple spectres of dead souls.
In the anthologies I read as a young child in my grandparents’ spare room at night, anthologies entitled as collections of Ghost Stories, I found stories featuring not just ghosts but also vampires and werewolves and curses, incomprehensible creatures, inkblots on the fabric of reality, predatory feelings and impressions… The Ghost Story is a form tending into a genre. It is a particular kind of expression of a particular class of social feelings, generated by the anxiety, alienation, and vertigo of the modern world. There is a crack down the spine of the history of the ghost story. It is a crack which separates the modern Ghost Story from the perennial story about the ghost, to the point of making it debatable whether we are actually talking about one continuous phenomena. The crack is, of course, modernity.
Just as capitalism adapted phenomena which pre-dated its triumph – such as the nation state – to its own purposes, and in so doing altered it qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to the point where the phenomena are linked by little more than a continuity of terminology, so too did it do this to the story of the supernatural irruption and the uncanny presence.
Long before the Ghost Story there were stories about ghosts. Pliny tells of a stoic philosopher who moves into a house haunted by a proper chain-rattling spectre which can only be laid (i.e. put to rest) when the phantom’s corpse is discovered and properly buried. And such stories go back all the way through antiquity, and further back still. …
