The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories
Page 2
It is an interesting, but unanswerable, question as to why the ghost story should have flourished then, and why, in particular, in the British Isles and America. Some tentative explanations may be given, though ultimately they leave the central mystery unexplained. One reason for its sudden rise lies in the peculiar talents and interests of a few individuals. The fact that Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James embraced the genre of the supernatural tale undoubtedly influenced their contemporaries and later followers. The sheer genius displayed in their tales exposed the possibilities of the form. These talented writers required – and found – equally talented readers. Such stories as Edith Wharton and others were writing presuppose a frightened reader, but also one who is peculiarly attentive, responding to events, creating meaning and weighing evidence.
Although he frequently voiced scepticism about spiritualism and spectral materializations, Charles Dickens was nonetheless an enthusiast for ghost stories. While the link is at least as old as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), it was very likely Dickens who established for Victorians the connection between Christmas and ghost stories, through the inset narrative of ‘The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton’ in the Christmas celebrations in Pickwick Papers (1836–7) and, of course, through A Christmas Carol (1843). The festive ghost is a curious conjunction, though one that expresses the central paradox of the genre: that is, the intertwining of cosiness and terror. The bond between Christmas and ghost stories would in time become a cultural cliché: as a character in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1920s story ‘The Back Drawing-Room’ cynically remarks: ‘ “Bring in the Yule log, this is a Dickens Christmas. We’re going to tell ghost stories.” ’1 As well as his contribution to the genre as writer, Dickens encouraged ghost-story writing in others and his taste for such tales influenced his practice as editor: notable ghost stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu and others appeared in magazines he edited.
There was also, for later practitioners, the legitimating influence of Henry James. If the form could seem to some inherently vulgar, James’s fascination with ‘the fantastic-gruesome, the supernatural thrilling’ raised its status.2 Clearly James recognized the possible embarrassment aroused by such a predilection – he commented that ‘one man’s amusement is at the best… another’s desolation’.3 For James the ghost story represented the limit of his feeling comfortable with the tale of adventure; on the other side of the boundary lay the impossible pirates and detectives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. The ghost was somehow finer, deeper, more subtle, better attuned to James’s interest in the drama of consciousness. When someone as fastidious as he could approve, an element of refinement could elevate the form.
For writers, too, there was the appeal of genre fiction. The form itself with its loose set of rules enabled the talented writer to offer variations on the spectral theme. Exploiting the familiarity of the form’s repeated situations, the writers could allow the genre to do some of the work for them, using the frame to create their own peculiar effects. The ghost story could therefore at once be a rigidly limited genre and a form of striking variety.
As M. R. James pointed out, the ghost story is after all only a particular kind of short story.4 The history of the short story is therefore necessarily entwined with that of the ghost. The reasons why the short story flourished as it did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are clear to see. In the British context, although its effects can be exaggerated, the expansion of an educated reading public following W. E. Forster’s Elementary Education Act of 1870 led to a significant increase in demand for good literary material. New printing technologies (linotype, rotary printers and so on) fostered the mass production of books; a new raft of publishing houses entered the business. Though still in relative terms prohibitively expensive for most, book prices nonetheless had fallen significantly by the end of the century. The gradual demise of the three-volume Victorian novel and the rise of interest in briefer forms also contributed. Partly, the desire for the succinct was provoked by the proliferation of periodicals, many of which (from socialist bulletins to society journals, from children’s papers to cycling magazines) required fiction to fill their pages. Though novels continued to be serialized, short stories were increasingly seen as the ideal fictional form for magazine readers. For writers, short stories paid more for less work; hence the production of short fiction was an excellent way to remain solvent. Editors were eager for stories, and writers were keen to provide them.
Alongside such material concerns there lies an increasing critical interest in the short story as a literary kind. The form itself was rather fluid, its chief characteristic being the indeterminate matter of its length. It was the American critic Brander Matthews who coined the term ‘short-story’ in 1884; in theorizing about such texts, he borrowed much from Edgar Allan Poe, the first great theorist of the short story and also its first great practitioner. Poe’s idea that the story aimed at unity of effect achieved through concision became central to the understanding of the form. Compression brought greater impact.
When Brander Matthews published a book on the subject, he entitled it The Philosophy of the Short-story (1901). That ‘philosophy’ looked to many to be a matter of fragmentation, as though the story, through ‘unity of effect’, expressed the multiplicity, the contradictions of life. This interest in the broken was supposed by many to echo the disruptions of modern existence. Critics remarked that the very brevity of the form suited the short-winded modern mind, which could not attend to things for long, and was perpetually hurried from event to event.
At its most literary, the short story could be provocative, enigmatic. By contrast, some of the most popular forms of the short story were far from open-ended. The comic yarn that moved to a punchline, the tale that turned finally on some twist, the detective story that made for the unmasking of a crime, all enacted closure, a self-contained expression of finality. By rigorous critics such stories would be faintly damned as mere ‘anecdotes’, opposed to the uncertain glance, the subtle epiphany of the true ‘short story’. The ghost story itself would combine both options uneasily; a genre tale, certainly, but one where endings were troubling, unsettled, sometimes painfully unresolved. Ghost stories must need be brief, because their effect is so tentative, so tenuous, their enchantment so fragile.
Robert Louis Stevenson asserted that the end of a tale should be ‘bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning’.5 However, the question of how best to end a ghost story remained open. There was no compulsion to end with marriage, or detection; and if the end were death, it was always only a repetition of the original death that permitted the haunting in the first place. The telos of the ghost story remained unresolved, because in the nineteenth century the ghost no longer had a stock purpose to fulfil within the tale. In the early modern period (1500–1800), the ghost had appeared as minister of justice, engaged still with the business of life. It returned from the dead to settle wills and inheritances, or was engaged with matters of revenge, or busy with requests for burial. (The belief that the righteous laying of the body will end the walking of the spirit remains a theme in later ghost stories too.) The ghost was occupied with disturbances in the family (or in religious practice); it would set about putting these right, and as such was a figure on the side of law, of religion, of order.
In the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, the ghost sometimes also has such a purpose – the spectres of Mary Austin’s ‘The Readjustment’ (1909) or Edith Wharton’s ‘Afterward’ (1910) come to mind, or the guardian ghost in M. R. James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925). In different circumstances, the ghost could seem a mere spirit of place, tied meaninglessly to one location. Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887) parodies the righteous spirit in a tale where haunting becomes a pointless and self-imposed duty. The question of motivation therefore time and again rebounds on to the haunted, who seem now, in a turning
of the tables, to be the active agent in the tale.
The ghost story depends upon anticipation touched with reticence. Forebodings reach us; a potentially unnoticed strangeness is there to catch the eye. Such stories most often avoid outrageous violence; they make us think horrors, not minutely witness them. From their beginnings, what might come lies hidden in the visible world of the story, itself so like the real world we live and die in. As with the detective story, a genre closely related, the reader must look for clues.6 These are rarely hard to discern. That is because the ghost story is not about guessing an ending, it’s about dreading its inevitable arrival. The indications of the ghost’s coming are therefore not so much clues as forebodings and portents. Stories are based on hints, deferrals, postponements, while heading towards a dénouement that is a confrontation with the thing itself; the end of the tale is often merely the moment when the ghost comes into sight.
THE HAUNTERS
What is a ghost? It is a figure that remains at once interpretable and evading, exceeding interpretation. All in the self that cannot be understood stands personified in the ghost.
Therefore, perhaps above anything else, the ghost is a way of engaging with our mystification about death. It survives with the belief that there is something left over when the human body becomes a corpse, that there is a residue, or remnant, that does not cease in the moment of dying. Some ghosts exude the horrors of the charnel house; others remain imperturbably decorous. Freed from the necessities of life, these ghosts neither eat nor drink, breathe nor excrete; they do not rot or putrefy, processes that somehow shame our bodies, but remain always cool, dignified and therefore inhuman.
The ghost can also seem something of a performer. This was one of the jokes of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’, where the spook busies himself impersonating an entire gallery of housebound spectres. In Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), the ghost resembles a figure in a pantomime, a madcap Harlequin mocking the elderly Pantaloon that is the haunted man.
Such theatricality calls to mind the thought that the ghost (or the ghost-story writer) might, like an actor, be a professional deceiver. The modern ghost exists in the gaps caused by the fallibility of our perceptions. It occupies a world of doubt, where the senses can deceive. When A. E. Housman wrote to M. R. James regarding the haunted telescope in ‘A View from a Hill’ (1925), he observed coolly that something seemed to be wrong with the optics.7 In the ghost story, there are many such faulty instruments and organs of sense. Repeatedly we follow the rapid correction of a mistake in perception; or just the opposite – the mind’s doubt that what we are perceiving can in fact be there. There is a ghost, we know it, but the seer cannot accept the fact. In any case, from the writer’s viewpoint, a ghost is an object best left vague. Appearance can produce bathos, and so humour.
Humour is rather awkwardly present in Grant Allen’s ‘Our Scientific Observances of a Ghost’ (collected in Strange Stories, 1884). Here the narrator and his accomplices subject a poor phantom to meticulous physical examination. Such thorough scrutiny had its real-life counterpart in the period, as the vogue for spiritualism (beginning in the 1840s) led to the scientific study of ‘supernatural’ phenomena. The key event – and very likely the subject satirized in Allen’s tale – was the foundation in 1882 of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Ghosts were seen by many at the time as the limiting border to scientific study, a subject on which science would necessarily have nothing to say. For others, the ghost, as a phenomenon within the real world, was a justifiable object for investigation. If supernatural incidents occurred within the physical realm, they could be enquired into and understood like any other. The ghost therefore existed on an uneasy boundary between the material and the immaterial, life and death, the analysable and the ineffable.
One means by which the ghost story could explore scientific investigation of spiritual phenomena was through the figure of the psychic doctor or private investigator. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius, the fictional collector of the uncanny tales of In a Glass Darkly (1872), is the ancestor of such types. A practitioner of metaphysical medicine, Hesselius is also a kind of detective, one who sees what others miss. (This might also be said, in a darker key, of the Rev. Mr Jennings, the victim in one of Le Fanu’s tales, ‘Green Tea’.) Later examples of this type would include Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki.
This technical approach to the ghost seemed to some a sad demystification. While Henry James knew and liked F. W. H. Myers, one of the central figures in the SPR, he also fretted that the Society might strip away the sacred horror from a ghost. In fact, James need not have worried. Myers himself enjoyed such a supernatural tale as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Moreover some of the SPR’s treatises could read uncannily like fictional ghost stories.
The division between feigning and truth was in any case necessarily evoked in documentary accounts of the ‘supernatural’. Issues of belief lay at the heart of both the SPR’s activities and the form of the ghost story itself. In both cases, the reader was to be persuaded of something that the rational mind hesitated to accept. As George Bernard Shaw once wrote to Henry James: ‘No man who doesn’t believe in a ghost ever sees one.’8 The fear in a ghost story is the fear of what we imagine: that is, of what we might fantasize and believe about others, about the world, about our houses, about ourselves. The ghost story is a literary form that invites us to imagine horrors. It operates in that realm where magic and science become confused, and where dreams and reality merge.
HAUNTINGS
The essential structure of the ghost story, from the 1840s onwards, can be read as the account of an intrusion into a space. As such, one of the first questions it raises is that of social roles and proprieties: who here is the intruder, the haunted or the haunter?
The ghost’s intrusion brings the unassimilable, the fact of death, abruptly into view. Yet perhaps ‘intrusion’ is the wrong word. Rather in the ghost’s haunting something suddenly appears in correspondence with something else. It is an unexpected and unsettling connection that shocks us.
These correspondences derive from the classic ghost story’s leaning on the deviation from the accustomed world. The ghost brings to light interference from elsewhere, the unwarranted entry of a disrupting element – one that is uncannily at home there. The familiar unveils its association with the unfamiliar. M. R. James argued that the rooting of a story in the common world of habits and timetables would aid the process of sympathetic identification between the reader and the haunted one. This rapport was one more of the genre’s correlations, and the key to its power to frighten.
The territory of the ghost story itself operates within the quotidian world and obeys, except for the ghost, the rules of realism. In particular, the American ghost story gives us a neighbourhood ghost, tied to the literary regionalism of the period, as in ‘The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House’ (1871) and ‘The Wind in the Rose-Bush’ (1903). British ghosts figure likewise in specific environments, including a surprisingly high count of stories in border districts, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852) exemplifying this tendency.
This interruption of the credible by the fantastic places the ghost story within the late nineteenth-century questioning of the facility of ‘realism’ to describe the world. In that sense, ghost stories were proto-modernist texts. In another, the genre was a parasite living off the realistic mode, an infringement of a literary convention on the basis of style. That violation itself becomes entirely acceptable, conventional and comprehensible in terms of genre. We just have to remember that it’s ‘only a ghost story’. Seen in these terms, the contravention of literary realism, its penetration by the fantastic, becomes safe, cosy and unthreatening.
Within the ghost story, there are many forms of similar encroachment. The spiritual intrudes on the physical, and in so doing becomes correspondingly physical itself. The most
feared property of the ghost is its ability to touch you. As the American critic Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935) put it: ‘it is through the sense of touch that the worst form of haunting comes. Seeing a supernatural visitant is terrible, hearing him is direful, smelling him is loathsome, but having him touch you is the climax of horror.’9 Yet can one be touched by the disembodied?
The other great fear evoked by the ghost story is that we will be dragged off from our own space, and taken to the place where the ghost comes from. That might be imagined as some intangible locale, a pocket in reality, another dimension. It may belong to some distant elsewhere, or be thought of as overlapping, a place jointly ‘owned’ by the haunter and the haunted, a coincidental time.
In another instance of such correspondences and invasions, the historical past can breach the present. During the late nineteenth century, some saw fear itself as atavistic, a return to archetypal primal panic. Yet rather the ghost story shows that fear is always new; it occurred before, it occurs now, and the past fear becomes a present one – much as the fictional character’s terror may be re-evoked in the reader. In M. R. James’s stories, this particular theme is exhibited through the discovery and handling of some antiquarian object: a book, a mezzotint, a whistle.
This historical interpenetration surfaces in many guises. The ghost’s return may signal a lingering form of pagan malevolence. Elsewhere, as in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’, the haunting may seem a mechanical repetition of the past, in which the ghost duplicates over and over some lost original action. The past stays on, but as a disturbance within the present. In other tales, the ghost symbolizes the enduring, while the living human stands for the transient.