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Post by jamtomorrow on Jul 8, 2012 15:53:20 GMT -5
Horroretc has a proud tradition of covering literary horror, and I would dig an M R James episode in the vein of the recent Lovecraft one. I know Tony's a fan. I haven't time to write much tonight, but I'll reply to my own thread here (hopefully tomorrow) with a lengthier post explaining the joys of Jamesian fiction for the uninitiated.
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Post by jamtomorrow on Jul 9, 2012 5:18:18 GMT -5
M R James Horroretc recently turned its attention to H P Lovecraft; Lovecraft was a devoted admirer of James, and he waxed lyrical about him in his long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (you can read it at gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/superhor.htm) citing him as one of the “modern masters” of weird fiction. Lovecraft took the trouble to send a copy of his essay to James, and James was very rude about it, making fun of Lovecraft’s prose style with his friends. On the face of it, James and Lovecraft would seem to have very little in common as writers. Lovecraft took the work of writing desperately seriously, whereas James (publicly) passed his stories off as an entertainment, a bit of Christmas fun. Lovecraft’s style is intense and prolix; James’ is detached and scholarly. Lovecraft concerns himself with deranged loners and outcast visionaries, and James’ protagonists are well-to-do and comfortable academics. However, I’d say they share a sort of spiritual kinship that isn’t at all obvious on first examination, and that resides in both authors’ sense of a vast and malevolent unknown. Lovecraft may write about interstellar beings of unimaginable power and James may write about shuffling horrors in locked rooms, but in both there is the feeling that the everyday world, recognisably the world we live in, appears solid and reliable yet is anything but; just out of sight lurk malevolent forces that we are incapable of understanding, encounters with which rarely end well. James is a prime example of that band of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century English authors, like J R R Tolkein and Lewis Carrol, who were in their lifetimes primarily known as academics and produced fiction as a hobby or pastime. In succeeding years, their fiction has achieved huge popularity whilst, it may be fair to say, their academic stature has paled somewhat. James was an antiquarian, a medievalist and an authority on the early history of the Bible and the apocrypha. He was, from a very early age, a voracious reader and a natural scholar. He went to school at Eton, and then on to King’s College, Cambridge, and his life remained dominated by those two academic institutions; in 1905 he became Provost of Kings, and in 1918 he took up the position of Provost at Eton, where he remained until his death in 1936. He began to write his ghost stories to read aloud to his Cambridge friends and students at Christmas. They were an immediate success, and his friends encouraged him to publish them; Ghost Stories of an Antiquary came out in 1904, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1911, A Thin Ghost and Others in 1919 and A Warning to the Curious in 1925. For my money, they’re the best ghost stories ever written. So what’s characteristic about James’ ghost stories? Nearly all of them are set in an antiquarian, scholarly context, frequently framed by an academic narrator who may or may not be James himself. James uses his familiarity with academia to create realistic background detail for the stories; he writes very authentic-sounding pastiches of anything from eighteenth century churchmen’s diaries to seventeenth century court records. This subtle and effective build-up of verisimilar detail is vital to the stories’ success, as they facilitate the suspension of disbelief like just about nothing else. You’ll often hear about James’ style being “reticent” or “suggestive”, meaning that James goes in for implied horror rather than full-on graphic nastiness. That’s partly true. James does have a very special talent for mentioning the seemingly incidental detail that, when the reader thinks about it, subtly implies something much nastier. And his stories are nearly always couched in terms of being an assemblage of found documents or narratives from different parties, so the reader is often at one remove from the horrible events themselves (though “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” and “Whistle, and I’ll Come to You” are excellent examples of his technique of dropping the reader into the scene, as it happens, when the horror takes centre stage). But there is real horror in James’ stories; deaths are frequent, and often very nasty, and the agents of the supernatural are always terrifying, and frequently physically repulsive. One of the most important features of the Jamesean ghost story is, of course, the Jamesean ghost, in which we see a real break from previous tradition. Whereas Victorian ghosts tend to be (in physical terms) ethereal, transparent and floaty , James’ ghosts are solid, rotting, animated cadavers, in effect pre-empting the imagining of the late C20th and early C21st zombie/walking dead. Interestingly, James’ ghosts often run at their victims with frightening speed. Older ghosts, like that of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, frequently had a definite personality and “human” motivations. James’ spectres rarely speak, and seem to have in the place of intelligence and motivation an all-consuming malice and hunger to destroy life, which purpose they are well-equipped to carry out, given their physical nature. Then there are those agents of supernatural evil that aren’t the spirits of the departed, but are nameless entities, frequently referred to by readers (though rarely by James himself) as “demons”. These include whatever the runes summon in “Casting the Runes” and the treasure-guardian in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”. In “Count Magnus”, the eponymous Count, we are told, went on the “Black Pilgrimage” to Chorazin (reputed birthplace-to-be of the Antichrist) and brought back with him a something... a something with tentacles that likes to rip the flesh off its victims’ faces (not a million miles from HPL’s universe, methinks). Most importantly, we never fully understand the ghosts. Sometimes they are clearly spirits of vengeance, but even then it’s a savage notion of justice that they embody, that, one suspects, could involve considerable collateral damage. On other occasions it’s impossible to anticipate what seemingly innocent act will invite malevolent horrors into your life. And there is, I feel, this underlying sense to James’ fictional world that is anything but cosy and domestic. James was cautious about making any statements regarding his own beliefs about ghosts; he once said, guardedly: “I am prepared to consider evidence, and accept it if it satisfies me”, and on another occasion, which some people have considered a more honest statement, “some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules.” Publicly, he never wavered from his line that he wrote his ghost stories as an amusement for himself and his friends, and if a wider audience appreciated them, so much the better. I’ve read many speculations to the contrary, though, and I’ve got to say that even though James could pull off the faux-scholarship in the stories with his eyes shut, there’s simply too much emotional energy invested in these stories to dismiss them as the product of an idle hobby. If you want to find out more about James on the web, the go-to place is Ghosts and Scholars, who have compiled some really entertaining and some really intellectually high-powered writings about his life and works (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html ). There’s also an excellent M R James podcast, A Podcast to the Curious, available on itunes etc., and their website is here (http://www.mrjamespodcast.com/) . If there’s any interest (or even if there isn’t!) I’ll return to this thread to write about some of the more notable stories, and some of the film and tv adaptations of his works. And I’d really appreciate hearing anyone else’s thoughts on the man! TTFN
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maarow
Ghost in the Graveyard
Posts: 509
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Post by maarow on Jul 9, 2012 17:33:28 GMT -5
Thanks for the information--I quite enjoyed reading that. I'm a fan of M.R. James, and do agree that he has written some of the greatest ghost stories ever imagined, but I admit I had never given much thought to exactly what set his work apart from his predecessors and contemporaries. He is masterful at creating so much atmosphere from so little; the fear really does live in the details. Even when something mind-bogglingly horrible does happen in the narrative, you are left not with the impact of the physical consequences, but with the broader implications of the horrific events, and their impact on the certainty we would like to possess with regard to our all-encompassing knowledge of the world we live in. If that makes sense.
I would very much like to hear a Horroretc episode on James.
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