Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism by Maria Margaroni;

Author:Maria Margaroni;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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The fabric of gothic modernism: Powers of horror in M. R. James’ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’

Nicholas Chare

Introduction: In the mouth of a mediaevalist

The mediaevalist and writer of ghost stories M. R. James (1862–1936) was not a self-proclaimed modernist, often displaying disdain for modern art and literary modernism.1 In his letters to Gwendolen McBryde, for instance, he expresses relief that the Royal Academy of Arts 1932 Exhibition of French Art stopped at 1900, meaning ‘the lowest depths have not been plumbed’ (James 1956: 177).2 Discussing a 1934 essay about his ghost stories by the modernist writer Mary Butts which was published in The London Mercury alongside one about James Joyce and a piece by Aldous Huxley, James refers to Huxley as ‘unspeakable’ and Joyce as a ‘charlatan’ (1956: 200–201). James’ aesthetic taste was conservative. The contemporary literature he read frequently seems to have been popular detective fiction by authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The British literary avant-garde of the early twentieth century were not of interest to him, although his work was of occasional interest to them, as Butts’ essay demonstrates.

Butts offered a highly complimentary critical engagement with James’ ghost stories, praising his style for its concision, precision and elegance.3 She noted the ambiguous status of ghost stories in general. As manifestations of mass culture, they provided ‘a kind of entertainment’ and were hence a suspect cultural form (1934: 307).4 The occult, however, was a subject of some interest to many modernist artists and writers.5 For Butts, James was noteworthy for his skill at withholding so as to impart: ‘when he tells us so little […] we know so much’ (1934: 310). His economy of description opened a space for dark imagining, inviting the reader to fill in the gaps. Another quality Butts identified as important in the stories was detachment. James kept his creations at arm’s length, writing of them with a figural sideways glance. Horrors are often reported indirectly rather than confronted head on. James gives the reader experiences of horror ‘second hand’, affording containment, imprisoning ‘things safely for us inside the covers of a book’ (1934: 317).

Although James’ style and turns of phrase betray the influence of Charles Dickens, the atmosphere of many of his stories is more indebted to another Victorian writer, the Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu.6 Le Fanu’s work encompasses many genres but James was inspired by his gothic tales. James’ indebtedness to the gothic tradition is recognized by Penny Fielding, who has used the theme of the library in his fiction works to trace how he explores themes of purity and contamination. Drawing briefly on Mary Douglas’ (1991) classic study of the concept of pollution, Purity and Danger, and on Julia Kristeva’s (1982) essay on abjection, Fielding reads the library in James’ stories as ‘a site of the impulse towards completeness and classification’ that is continually threatened by spectres of deficiency and forces of disorder (2000: 766). Her identification of order and its disturbance as a key theme in James’ work is compelling.

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