Wednesday, September 24, 2014

as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book : ghost stories by Kipling, Wells, and M. R. James

I don’t know if A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories is truly eccentric or if I am imposing a pattern suggested by her clever misdirection.  But she says she developed a “dislike for the ‘well-made tale’” (xvi), and I see the evidence of it.  She likes stories that go screwy, that take a big swerve.  Hey, me too.  And she likes fantasy stories of many types.  I’ll glance at three of those, three ghost stories.

The M. R. James selection, “Two Doctors” (1919, maybe), is the most traditional ghost story, or else has no ghost at all but rather perhaps some other kind of hobgoblin.  Some readers might remember that two years ago I spent a week reading ghost stories, which was instructive even if I was “shaken a bit by the fact that 75% of the ghost stories I read this week were about haunted bedrooms and the mysterious movements of bedclothes.”  Hey, guess what’s in “Two Doctors”?  I can’t even.  This time it’s a pillow.

“Under the Knife” (1896) by H. G. Wells is a science fantasy on the theme of anesthesia.  The ghost is the narrator, who, certain that he will die during surgery, has what we now call a near-death experience, first watching his own surgery before dying – this is where the story swerves – and being flung into the cosmos:

At last a quarter of the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered together.  It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by the wind.  I had come out into the wilderness of space.  Ever the vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on every side.  (136-7)

I have doubts about that jack-o’-lantern.  Maybe I should have saved this story for Halloween.  The cosmic journey climaxes with a vision of God, or perhaps Steve Ditko’s Eternity (see left).  Alan Moore pilfers the scene for Swamp Thing #50.  This is why people come to Wuthering Expectations.

In Rudyard Kipling’s “’Wireless’” (1902), the ghost is John Keats, or the electromagnetic spirit of radio, or some mix of both.  Whatever the source, which is never resolved, much of the latter half of the story is a description of a fellow in a trance composing Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” as uncanny a performance as I have ever seen a fictional ghost pull off.

He repeated it once more, using ‘blander’ for ‘smoother’ in the second line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes missed no stroke of any word) he submitted ‘soother’ for his atrocious second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book.  (123)

This ought to be the dullest story ever written.  We watch one fellow write a poem while another tinkers with a radio. But that was not my experience.  The story is of course a parable about creativity as Kipling saw it – magic and science, good luck and hard thinking, what is right in front of me plus what no one has ever seen.

14 comments:

  1. This is exactly what I come to Wuthering Expectations for most definitely! That Wells story is and your analysis of it is a riot. :)

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  2. It's like that Borges story about writing Don Quixote, but with a ghost. Not the jack-o-lantern, I mean. The other one.

    Byatt has played with ghost stories for decades. Do you know her Little Black Book of Stories? Scary tales that all swerve pretty radically. She also wrote a novella about a djinn, in a bottle, in the 20th century. And Ragnarok, which I haven't read at all.

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  3. For how old stories show up in later comic books, really? Not that those Doctor Strange and Swamp Thing stories are not classics.

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  4. Byatt is a writer who does a lot of what I want a fiction writer to do, who has a lot of the characteristics I most enjoy, but for some reason I have barely read her, so I do not know any of the books you mention. I should read Ragnarok before I close up the Scandinavian project.

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    1. Byatt does some surprising things, out of the blue almost. In one book she interrupts the narrative to tell the reader that the present scene is written around the image which provided the creative spark for the whole novel (actually a quartet of novels). The first book in that quartet ends with something like, "every novel must end somewhere, and this is as good a place as any." I'm talking about the Babel Tower series here, which is full of literary criticism and formal experimentation, and in which one character is doing formal literary experiments that mirror those of Byatt's. There's a lot of goofy stuff in her books, too, that's almost embarrassing as a reader. But she writes marvelously about food and clothing and sex.

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  5. I'm hoping that your bi-annual visit with ghost stories becomes a regular and even more frequent feature. The last one was immensely enjoyable, and this one (though not all of them ghost stories and though you haven't explicitly promised more) already seems poised to top that.

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  6. Sadly, Borges also rewrote the Jack-o-lantern story (see The South). In The South, the ghost is the protagonist, who, realizing that he had died during surgery, is having what we now call a near-death experience. And the only way to realize that it is a ghost story is to notice a very little clue: the owner of a certain store in a little hamlet in the deep south, which the main character has never visited before, calls him out by his last name.

    Mr. Bailey, thank you for the Byatt pointer, I'm about to make Misters Barnes and Noble richer, again. (How I envy those who live near a public library with more than 2,000 books on its shelves...).

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  7. "The South," yes, of course! I wish I had thought of that. The notion of the cosmos in the two stories is amusingly different.

    Bi-annual sounds about right for this feature. It is not completely a coincidence that I have wandered into it this week, even if I had originally planned something else. Maybe I'll write that up tonight.

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  8. Now you have me curious about when (and why) we started telling each other ghost stories. I imagine people sitting around the campfire in the cave, and then Groka tells everyone about Horgata -- the unfortunate vengeful fellow who was killed by the mastodon after the same mastodon had stomped his wife and children to death at the nearby watering hole -- roaming about the forests at night, looking for his lost family. But, seriously, I do wonder about the "history" of the ghost story as a printed genre. So, without further delay, I off to do some research. Suggestions from you and your readers will not be rejected.

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  9. Ghosts go back to the beginning of literature - The Egyptian Book of the Dead and so on. The Witch of Endor, Homer. I assume the same is true for classical Chinese and Sanskrit literature.

    The ghosts in the Icelandic sagas are hardly even ghost-like - horrible physical monsters that can be crushed to death by a troll like Grettir, but also uncursed through by means of poetry as in the Sjón novel I am reading. The Icelandic ghosts are not at all English ghosts.

    A key to the modern ghost story has to be that so few people believe any of it. The fear is pleasurably displaced. So I would guess this kind of story is an Enlightenment invention, a Gothic spin-off, but I don't know. In the "Headless Horseman," early in the 19th century, Irving is already writing a parody of the ghost story.

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    1. I imagine that the "forces beyond our control" trope is ancient. The latest versions of it involve robots and zombies, though demonic possession still seems popular. I'd like to see a good old fashioned chain-rattling ghost, myself.

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    2. I once thought I saw a ghost (of sorts) several days after my father died when I was 18, but whatever I "saw" was probably just a creation of my grief. Of course, our emotions and our imaginations can create things that are even worse than the so-called "real thing" when it comes to ghosts. And, Scott, I agree that zombies (and I should add vampires) are variations on our not-so-religious experiences, whereas angels (e.g., Blake's visions) are perhaps variations on our religious experiences. I suppose within all that rambling is some profound theory about religions, emotions, and imaginations, but am neither heretical nor informed enough to state such a theory.

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  10. That does sound like an eccentric collection - though on reflection, I realize that a surprisingly large proportion of material in most of my own short fiction anthologies is not British but American and Canadian, so maybe I just don't know from the British short fiction canon. At any rate, you've sold me on the Kipling one, which I'll have to go find.

    I have read a fair bit of Byatt but tend to like the less swerve-y ones. I thought The Children's Book was pretty stunning.

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  11. More eccentric than that, even, because the anthology is by design purely English - no Scots, Irish, or Imperials, which means no Stevenson, no Joyce, no Frank O'Connor, no Katherine Mansfield.

    And then she omits Gaskell, Maugham, Forster and Lessing for various idiosyncratic reasons. Byatt is making a counter-canonical gesture of some kind. I am not complaining, even if the result is a little puzzling.

    The Children's Book sounds like it has everything I like.

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