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m r james

And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 2)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark.  Here is Part 1 of this essay.  It really is one continuous and continuing piece.

I had no heart to post this last week.  But that was last week.

 

4. Just what kind of Anglican churchman is Dr John Benwell Haynes?

i.

We will start with the most basic trait of the story’s main character: his name.  It is hard to believe that M.R. James used this name without referential intent, since it takes us right back into the heart of the early English Reformation.

Simon Haynes, sometimes Heynes, (c.1495-1552), was, writes Professor Alec Ryrie in The Gospel and Henry VIII – Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, “one of the most well connected evangelicals of the period.”

Simon Haynes attended Queens’ College, Cambridge; the same college where Erasmus studied during his time in England.  Erasmus would have been there at the same time as Haynes, so it seems likely they met.  Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a Protestant – he remained a Catholic and originally refused to take sides in the Luther / anti-Luther debate, eventually coming down against Luther – but his humanist critiques and satires paved the way for reformist, eventually Protestant ideas.  And it is difficult to argue that his 1516 publication of a translation of the New Testament into Latin and Greek had no influence on the Reformation, which began almost immediately afterwards.  1516 was the same year Erasmus left Queens’ College, and in which Haynes graduated and was made a fellow.  After taking holy orders, he continued to rise through the college positions, eventually becoming president (same thing as ‘master’ in most colleges).

In 1533, Haynes was one of the delegates to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s special court at Dunstable Priory, which was tasked with judging the arguments Henry VIII was putting forward for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  Unsurprisingly, Henry’s archbishop and his panel agreed with Henry’s position, and Cranmer declared the marriage annulled.  The following year, Haynes teamed up with Bishop John Skip (or Skypp) – chaplain of now-Queen Anne Boleyn – to preach against papal supremacy at Cambridge.  Haynes then served as an ambassador to France alongside Christopher Mount (or Mont), as an agent of evangelical reformer – and first architect of the English Reformation – Thomas Cromwell.  Their secret mission was to establish lines of communication with Martin Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, and possibly persuade him to come to England.  As Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Haynes attended the baptism of the baby who would later be crowned Edward VI and oversee the most ideologically and governmentally thoroughgoing phase of England’s Protestant Reformation.  In combination with the arch-persecutor of English Catholics (and future backslider) Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, Haynes accused Sir Thomas Wyatt (Ambassador to Spain, poet, and rumoured lover – or at least adorer – of Anne Boleyn) of unlawful contact with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole. …

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 1)

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On ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

 

  1. Introduction

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was one of the stories that M.R. James wrote in order to perform for his friends and guests at the famous Christmas meetings of the Chit-Chat Club.  It was subsequently published in Contemporary Review in 1910, and then republished in a book entitled More Ghost Stories (a sequel to his first published volume of stories Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) in 1911.  In an introduction, James describes the fictional Barchester Cathedral as “a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford”, and is clearly also riffing on the Barchester of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.  James was a reader of contemporary fiction.

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was adapted for television by the BBC in 1971.  Under the slightly truncated title ‘The Stalls of Barchester’, this adaptation inaugurated the famous strand of TV films known as the A Ghost Story for Christmas series.

The story was also adapted for television in 2000 by BBC Scotland as one episode of the four part series Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

 

  1. The Story (including total spoileration)

‘The Stalls of Barchester’ is a murder mystery without a mystery and a ghost story without a ghost.

There follows a necessary recitation of the plot.  I strongly urge the reader to experience the story for themselves first.

In the early 19th century, Dr John Benwell Haynes, the unmarried and widely admired precentor of Barchester Cathedral, succeeds to the post of archdeacon after the death of the extremely elderly archdeacon Pulteney.  Pulteney has died in a fall down the stairs, reportedly as a result of a stair rod being left under the carpet by an inefficient maid servant, Jane Lee.  Lee, we hear, has been dismissed.  In contrast to the deaf and senile Pulteney, Haynes is a zealous and efficient administrator.  A big part of his job seems to be to get the tenants on diocese-owned land to start paying their rents again, something the late archdeacon Pulteney permitted to lapse for years (may the angels guard his grave).  It takes Haynes three years to put the affairs of the cathedral and diocese to rights again.  Once this is achieved, things start to go badly for him.

One evening, during prayers in the cathedral, Haynes is touching “an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat” on his choir stall and, instead of wood, feels fur and a living body under his fingers.  On another occasion, he is touching another carved figure – an ambiguous character with a mutilated face and a noose around its neck, cowled like “a monk, or ‘friar of orders grey’”, who seems to represent Death himself – and feels the dank fabric of its robes.

These quotations come from Haynes himself.  James gives us sections from a letter Haynes drafts (but apparently never sends) to Sylvanus Urban, some time before his supernatural experiences begin.  Sylvanus Urban was the pen name of Edward Cave (1691-1754), the founder, editor, and publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine (he thus coined the term ‘magazine’ to refer to a printed periodical). …

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Uncommon Prayer-Books

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(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.  …

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An Evening’s Entertainment

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On Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee (2000, BBC Scotland)

This essay is intended as a light introduction to a series on the ghost story writer M.R. James, some of his stories, and their television adaptations, as well as some related texts and phenomena, which I hope to post fairly regularly over the next few months.

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In 2000, on four evenings over the Christmas period, BBC2 aired a series of half-hour programmes entitled Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

In a previous essay, I wrote a little about my childhood introduction to ghost stories.  I’ve spoken on podcasts about my near-lifelong love of Hammer films.  It will be no surprise then that 24-year-old me tuned in to this series, and recorded the episodes on a home VHS recorder.

Three of the episodes have long been available on the various versions of the BFI DVD/blu-ray box-set of television Ghost Stories for Christmas, whereas one – ‘The Ash Tree’ – was never released owing to rights issues over music used in it.  The BBC – with its special rights arrangements – used part of the musical score by Howard Shore for the 1986 film The Name of the Rose in the background of the Ash Tree episode, which subsequently made it impossible to release commercially.  The episode has since been repeated – for the first time in years – on BBC Four, as part of the resurrection of the whole idea of British television ghost stories at Christmas which began in the mid-aughts.  For a while, however, the only way people could see the Ash Tree episode of the Christopher Lee Christmas Ghost Stories was the rip of my own old VHS recording which I uploaded to YouTube.

While I was already enamoured with ghost stories and Horror in general, it was this 2000 series which began my fascination with the work of M.R. James.  With respect, I am not so interested in the man, except insofar as his life illuminates his work.  (L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle misquotes Flaubert in ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’.)  But this television series was a quiet revelation to me.  A slow revelation too, as it only gradually dawned on me how great it was, and how great was its source material.

These episodes are the greatest screen adaptations of the work of M.R. James.  That is a bit of a claim, given the love and esteem in which the 1970s Lawrence Gordon Clark films are held.  Before I (sort of) defend it, let me talk around the issue a little.

As mentioned above, in the early aughts the BBC suddenly decided to remember its old tradition of adapting ghost stories – most famously the work of M.R. James – for Christmas dramas, and to resurrect the tradition.  (The early aughts were, of course, famously the moment when the BBC resurrected one of its other vintage series, with great success.)  The resurrected Christmas ghost story drama genre soon came under the stewardship of Mark Gatiss, and he also presented a documentary about M.R.…

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“I have in my hand a piece of paper,” says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, “which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!”

The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.

“When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year…” Stevens begins.

“It were a shame, that was!” heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.

“No, my friends,” says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, “we must not be bitter. We must face the facts.”

Note the ‘we’; the most abused word in political discourse.  As in ‘we’re all in this together’.

“Coal is a dying industry,” asserts Stevens.

The miners shout “Rubbish! Rubbish!”

When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish.  Mining was always subsidised.  

“Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!”  So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people’s jobs.  “I have it here in black and white!”

There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots.  The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob – a trope that goes back a long way.

“Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!”  The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.

In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene.  Miners were powerful and militant in 1973.  They were unionised and they were winning.  They weren’t sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.

In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient.  By the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in ’74 (the year after this story was broadcast).  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.

And when Stevens says “oil is the future” he’s only telling part of the truth.  The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure.  Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc.  This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism… which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973.…

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Skulltopus 12: Come Out onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle

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Okay, first a quick (well… relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications… because we’ve come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.

The Story So Far…

If only ‘Pirates of the Caribbean II’ had looked this good.

According to China Miéville, the tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as ‘the Weird’.  Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc.  They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a ‘novum’, unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis.  (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and ‘ghost story’ writer M.R. James.)  Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic.  The gothic – or hauntological – is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return.  The Weird is what we don’t – and perhaps cannot – know, erupting without precedent and confronting us with our own incomprehension.  Consequently, the gothic and the Weird exist in “non-dialectical superposition”, oscillating back and forth… something which shows in the almost total absence in Western monsterology of the skulltopus, a fusion of skull (gothic) and octopus (Weird) which, on the face of it, would seem to be quite an obvious synthesis, especially given that the central hub of an octopus’s body is decidedly skull-like in shape.

Much later, long after the process in Western literary and graphic monsterology that Miéville describes, and long after tentacles had been thoroughly assimilated into the mainstream of Western Horror and SF, tentacles begin to make their presence felt in Doctor Who. In the early days, most of the tentacles that appeared in the show did so courtesy of Terry Nation. For instance, he adroitly selected an octopus as a meaningless plot-device monster in ‘The Chase’. He may have done this because the octopoidal carried a residual charge of blankness or meaninglessness. Also, Nation seems to have repeatedly associated a tentacular or Weirdesque monster with economic exploitation. The Brains of Morphoton have stubby tentacles and run an entire economy on hypnotism, making scarcity seem like material abundance; the Slyther turns up when the Daleks are forcing people to mine for them and black-marketeers are taking advantage of the situation. This may be a co-optation of the ‘blankness’ of the tentacular inherited from the Weird. It may also be that, because the modernity that filled the Weird writers with such nebulous horror was capitalist modernity, there is something in their pre-eminent monster-type that naturally lends itself to expressing horror at economic exploitation. (They themselves would probably have rejected this, most of them being reactionaries… though, interestingly, Lovecraft – who was a disgusting racist, living in dread of ‘miscegenation’ – once identified himself as a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, even calling himself a ‘socialist’.)…

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Skulltopus 10: How Green Was My Death?

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‘The Green Death’ is a ghost story.  Doctor Who itself may actually be best described, from one standpoint, as an anthology of ghost stories.

Okay, let’s go back a bit.

Firstly, let me defend my notion about 70s Doctor Who sprouting Weird tentacles when it notices (and thus needs to evade and/or signify) capitalism.  ‘The Green Death’ is clearly aware of capitalism and, sure enough, shows signs of Weird inflection.  (I’m aware, by the way, that I keep talking about the show as though its alive… a form of commodity fetishism that I’ll address some day.)

Apart from anything else, there’s a dirty great tentacle in ‘The Green Death’.  It’s only in it for a few seconds, during the Doctor’s abortive trip to Metebelis III, but still…

As in ‘Curse of Peladon‘, this is the tentacular riding in on past associations… however, it can’t be said to work quite the same way as previous tentacles in the Pertwee era.  This tentacle is clearly not obscuring any potential thematic convergence upon the subject of capitalism, as in ‘Spearhead from Space‘ and ‘Claws of Axos‘.  Nor is it standing in for implied capitalism, as in ‘Curse of Peladon’.  Capitalism is something that ‘The Green Death’ is aware of openly.  It doesn’t need to be either obscured or implied… especially since the ‘critique’ of capitalism the story offers is actually quite diffident, to the extent of dehumanizing the working class.  And this tentacle is only a momentarily glimpsed feature of a side-trip, taking place literally light years away from Global Chemicals.  However, it’s in ‘The Green Death’ rather than, say, ‘The Time Warrior’.  It’s in a story about an evil corporation rather than one about a feudal warlord.  So, the association is still evident and active.

There is also a distinct Weird inflection to the maggots.  Their multiplicitous tubular wriggliness is hardly a million miles from being tentacular.  They have some of that quintessentially Weird incoherence.  

However, like ‘Spearhead from Space’, ‘The Claws of Axos’ and ‘Curse of Peladon’ before it, ‘Green Death’ retains a hauntological charge.  

The maggots themselves are steeped in gothic, in associations to do with death.  Real maggots breed in corpses or bad meat.  They are of putrefaction.  This suggests skulls and bones and graveyards, and it suggests them in the gothic mode: as signalling extremes and transgressions, and the haunting presence of that which has been denied and repressed.  Biological corruption is here aesthetically linked with the corruption of the environment by big business.  The maggots appear in the mine because they are generated by the toxic waste from the Stevens Process, which is secretly dumped underground.  Eventually, they erupt out of the mine into the world above, like zombies out of graves.  They make a typical gothic move.  They do it almost too literally.  They have been repressed and then they return.  They have been buried out of sight but wriggle out of their subterranean hiding-place.  Moreover, this is gothic very much in the Who mode.…

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Skulltopus

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In his fascinating essay ‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire’ (the link is to a PDF), the author and theorist China Miéville wrote:

The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.

Miéville charts the way that the cephalopodic suddenly erupts into late 19th-early 20th century “teratology” (monsterology), with conflicted foreshadowings and pre-disavowals (Verne, for example, and Victor Hugo) leading up to a story called ‘The Sea Raiders’ by H. G. Wells, in which previously unknown squidular monsters suddenly surface and go on an inexplicable rampage off the British coast, and on to the “haute Weird” of William Hope Hodgson and, especially, H. P. Lovecraft.

In this Weird tentacular, Miéville sees much significance.  His argument, as I’ve gathered from the essay mentioned above (and from listening to various talks he’s given), is that the squidular, tentacular and cephalopodic, but especially the octopoidal, arises as a teratological metaphor to supply a need felt by those writers travelling through the crises of modernity at the turn of the 19th-20th century and after.  In their formless and protean nature – many octopuses and squid have developed natural camouflage abilities, making them capable of astonishing feats of transformation – the octopoda seemed to be the shape to use in order to convey shapelessness.  Moreover, the very “novum” or newness of the tentacular (in the West) as a symbol was attractive to those seeking to convey something that had not been conveyed before, that perhaps cannot be coherently conveyed at all.

The octopus – as I’ve mentioned on this blog and in Panic Moon, following my reading of Miéville – suddenly appears in and conquers the 20th century political propaganda poster (you can see an amazing array of such political octopus propaganda at this blog… to which I have contributed myself).  I’ve suggested (rather obviously and, I’m sure, unoriginally) that the many arms of the octopus, radiating outwards from the central hub of the body, make it a perfect graphic figure for representing the putative multifarious global reach and manipulative ability of centralised power, whether that power is military, commercial, ideological, whatever.  Exactly the kind of centralised but increasingly global power that was arising in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The octopus poster tends to show the creature reaching to many places at once.  Miéville himself has spoken of the octopus as suggesting manipulation.  He has noted how, in these propaganda representations, the octopus is used to signify just about everything from “perfidious Jews” and “perfidious Bolsheviks” to “capitalists”, “unrestrained railroad building” and “landlords”.  In other words, it means everything… hence it means nothing.  The octopus became immensely “symbolically fecund” in the early decades of the 20th century, but with no set cultural consensus about what it probably meant (unlike vampires and werewolves, say, which had – and still have – very well established, longstanding semiotic baggage). …

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