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Voyaient Spankingsweetbaremaids Comment A%3E%3C Strong%3E%20on%20July%2021 %202009%20%3Cbr%20 %3E%20at%202:59%20pm%3C P%3E%3Cp%3E%3Ca%20rel Spanking Sweet Bare Maids M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire | China Miéville | Weird Fiction Review
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This must be insisted upon for the heuristic edges of the Weird and the hauntological – and indeed of other fantastic categories – to stay sharp. Hence the importance of ‘Geek Critique’, which rebukes, say, Terry Eagleton when he blithely discusses the ‘rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead’;(25) because whatever the merits of the rest of his argument, only two of those figures are undead, and they are all different. Teratological specificity demands attention. And, granting the controversial position that ghosts are teratological subjects, such specificities are nowhere more different and important than between Weird and hauntological.
Eagleton’s sort of cavalier hand-waving is increasingly rare, at least when it comes to the ghostly. Compare Eagleton with Sasha Handley, who points out that ‘to distinguish the particular meanings attached to ghosts’ demands taxonomy, and that her object of study is not ‘anonymous angelic or evil spirits’ but ‘spirit[s] appearing after death’.(26) Some years previously, however, two such perspicacious writers as Julia Briggs and Jack Sullivan as a matter of policy play fast and loose with categories of ghosthood. ‘I am […] compromising’, Sullivan says. ‘All of these stories are apparitional, in one sense or another, and “ghost story” is as good a term as any.’(27) According to Briggs, ‘the term “ghost story” […] can denote not only stories about ghosts, but […] spirits other than those of the dead […] To distinguish these from one another according to the exact shape adopted by the spirit would be an unrewarding exercise.’(28) I have argued, rather, that the ‘exact shape’ is of enormous importance.
Briggs and Sullivan are wrong, but their error is not merely personal. While we may sympathise with S.T. Joshi in finding this use of the term ‘ghost story’ ‘irksome’, his deployment of a robust common sense against it – ‘To me “ghost story” can mean nothing but a story with a ghost in it’(29) – does not get at the nature of the problem. Key here is Briggs’s justification of her imprecision by claiming that the term ‘ghost story’ ‘is being employed with something of the latitude that characterizes its general usage’.(30) The imprecision is that of the culture, and it shifts.
A quarter-century before Briggs, ‘reasons of simplicity’ were sufficient for Penzoldt to ‘use the term “ghost story” also for tales of the supernatural that do not deal with a ghost’.(31) Mindful that there is nothing simple about such a decision, Briggs by contrast feels the need to justify her own position at some length: the looseness of usage is changing. A quarter-century after her, the new common sense has become that ghostly ghost stories are ‘a distinct literary form’,(32) and when Handley asserts her own position, precisely contrary to Briggs’s, almost as read but not quite, she takes a moment to argue it. Clearly the politics of ghostly specificity has shifted markedly, but has not banished all remnants of its countertendency – hauntology is haunted by a pre-hauntological taxonomic indeterminacy.
At this point in history, describing as a ‘ghost story’ a piece about werewolves or vampires, let alone about Shub-Niggurath or similar, would likely be considered false advertising. But it was not always so. In the early twentieth century, the terato-taxonomic membrane least breached today, that between the Weird and the Hauntological, was more likely to be permeated than that between ghosts and ‘traditional’ monsters. The self-styled ‘ghost stories’ of the 1920s might feature, say, giant flesh-sucking slugs (‘Negotium Perambulans’ and ‘And No Bird Sings’, by E.F. Benson).
As Handley points out, a ghost meant to the eighteenth-century English just what it does to us now: a revenant, not some eldritch oozing tentacled thing. At some point after 1800, however, that distinct ghost-ness of the ghost ebbed – temporarily, as it turned out – until by 1910 Hodgson’s haute–Weird adventurer Carnacki could without embarrassment be described as a ‘Ghost Finder’ in his battles with Hog-manifestations of ‘million-mile-long clouds of monstrosity’.
It is not so much irony as a constitutive contradiction that it was a few years before that, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, almost precisely in the middle of that trajectory of the de-ghosting ghost, that the key works of what is now vaunted as a high ghostly, an echt hauntologic, the ‘tradition’ of the English ghost story, appeared.
2. Ancestral Spirits
The eighteenth-Century ghost was a revenant who tended to moralism and anti-Popish sniping, embodying as dread example lessons about virtue, justice, and so on.(33) In the early nineteenth century, the explicitly sectarian character of that moralism had waned, but the instructional nature of hauntings remained.
Cultural production expressed anxiety over the sclerotic arrogance of the Victorian era and its victims, as well as the dominant culture’s ideological counterattack, the tendency to increased and cruder moralism. Non-mimetic art tends to express such frictions particularly vividly, and in the nineteenth century we can see the battle for the two souls of the ghost in the fictions of Dickens, versus those of the man he published,(34) Sheridan Le Fanu.
Dickens thinks nothing of jostling together, in ‘A Christmas Carol’, the ghost of a person, Jacob Marley, with those of various Christmases. To post-hauntological eyes this is a category-error, but Dickens is merely subordinating the specifics of the ghost to his extreme and mawkish extrapolation of the preceding epoch’s tendency to morally ‘mean’ with spectrality. In neither ‘The Haunted House’ (1859) nor ‘The Haunted Man’ (1848) are the haunts revenants of the dead, but ‘of my own innocence’, or a doppelganger who performs a selective mnemectomy so the story can thumpingly moralise that it is important to remember wrong done to us ‘that we may forgive it’. Dickens’s ghosts are apotheoses of the instructional ghosts of the preceding century – out of time, rearguard in their sentimentality, themselves haunted by the future. They are not so much convincing, morally, as performatively flourished. These are not modern ghosts, but the last, already-dead walking dead of a dead epoch, bobbed about on sticks.
Le Fanu’s ghosts, by contrast, in their moral contingency, are intimations of disaster.(35) Even in his more seemingly traditional ‘moral’ stories, such as ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ (1872), the nature of the spectral agents of revenge – their inhuman, de-subject-ed strangeness, and the repeated intimations that they, victims of injustice, are in hell (‘pallid […] secretly suffering […] glittering eyes and teeth’) makes sense according to no moral accounting. In the extraordinary ‘Green Tea’ (1869), the text’s insinuations that Jennings’s merciless torment at the hands of the abominable monkey spirit is in some way payback – that he is ‘guilty’, that he shows ‘shame’, though for what is unknown – read as morally obscene.
The blurring of the Weird with the ghostly is prefigured in the auditioning of animal spirits as avatars of the monstrous (before the Weird’s demand to be considered cephalopod was clear), in the stark and amoral universe, in the autotelos of the monster (the monkey in ‘Green Tea’ just is), perhaps in the formlessness-implying shapeshifting of the vampire Carmilla (1872).* For these reasons it is tempting to agree with Sullivan that Le Fanu, rather than the more-usually-cited James, is the key revolutionary figure in the so-called ‘traditional’ ghost-story that we can now see was a – Weird-inflected – ‘New Ghostly’.
However, while his fiction is if anything more vatic and perspicacious than James’s (shades of Hodgson and Lovecraft), Le Fanu is a towering interstitial figure. The popular story of his death is so theoretically kitsch on this point that it could have been scripted by a cultural critic. Le Fanu was reputedly a martyr to a recurring nightmare about being crushed to death by the collapse of an old grand mansion. When discovered dead, a horrified look on his face, his doctor was said to have intoned: ‘I feared this. That house fell on him at last.’ The story is tenacious, which, in the face of the fact that it is almost certainly untrue,(36) bespeaks its cultural resonance. Le Fanu’s problematic is the crisis and coming fall of the house of Victoriana (and of the particular colonial upheavals of fading Protestant Ascendancy), and as such foundational to what followed; but the present of which it is a vivid expression is the fringe of a past, rather than the start of a future. His fiction is of end and failure.
The politics of sensory perception are important. Le Fanu, in his masterwork ‘Green Tea’, stresses the malevolent inhuman strangeness of the monkey, but also that it was incorporeal. This was, in ghost-story terms, not ‘New Ghostly’ but ‘new traditionalism’, uniting Le Fanu with Dickens and other pre-Weird, fabular-logic-wielding ghost-smiths. As Victorian ghosts grew more ostentatiously moralistic, they decorporealised. (In earlier centuries they had moralised and provided the thrills of physicality: they were often ‘thought capable of moving material objects and of inflicting physical harm […] [and] those who were confronted by ghosts believed that they could inflict material damage by shooting or stabbing the spirit’.)(37)
Central in marking him out as the key figure in this peculiar period, later to be designated the birth of a ghost-nation, Le Fanu’s disciple M.R. James’s ghosts could be touched, and touch.
3. The Old New Weird Ghostly
James is regularly cited as a – or the – founder of the ‘tradition’ of English ghost stories. It is commonplace to then wryly point out that James’s ghosts are in fact often not ghosts, but inhuman ‘demons’ of one sort or another.38 Lovecraft stressed that James had ‘invent[ed] a new type of ghost’, not ‘pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight’ but ‘lean, dwarfish, and hairy – a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man – and usually touched before it is seen’.(39) In the rubble of the Lovecraft Event we can go further: the adversaries of James’s stories are disproportionately and emphatically Weird.
• Touch and touchability is central. James’s is the horror of the physical universe (a trauma that would trace into the obsessive materiality/-ism of Lovecraft’s horror). It is the cloth-ness of the notorious face ‘of crumpled linen’ in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ that makes it so terrible. James even names one of his late stories ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’. The touchability of his ‘ghosts’ is not a return to that of their 18th-century cousins: this is a new (Weird) haptos, with little to do with human somaticism, and everything to do with the horror of matter. The most grotesque moment in ‘The Ash Tree’ is the ‘soft plump, like a kitten’, with which a just-glimpsed giant spider drops off the bed.
• James’s repeated insistence that he is an ‘antiquary’ is not convincing. He is acutely conscious of capitalist modernity, and a surprising number of his ‘ghosts’ manifest through it. The demon in ‘Casting the Runes’ bizarrely announces its intent by means of an advertisement in a railway carriage. The attack which the runes occasion is brought down quite amorally on whoever took them last, according to the depersonalised passings-on of bits of paper. The horror is of the universal equivalent in mass commodification: the runes are Bad Money. Most astonishingly, in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, what is haunted is not a scrap of fabric nor the materials with which it is made but the design upon it: it is the copied design, reprinted with explicitly cutting-edge modern techniques, that is the locus for the apparition. This is the work of hauntology in the age of mechanical reproduction.
• James, like the haute Weird, is largely uninterested in plot, subordinating it to his invented strangeness. Unlike Lovecraft, who might simply dispense with it, to present Weirdness in pulp bricolage, ‘flashed out’, as he puts it, ‘from an accidental piecing together of separated things’,(40) James goes through the motions of plot; but i) his narrative arcs are utterly predictable, and ii) he knows this, and repeatedly uses formulations like ‘I surely do not need to tell you …’ or ‘It will be redundant to conclude…’ or similar. This palpable impatience is underlined by his later increasingly epigrammatic and sparse stories. And like Borges, when he cannot be bothered even with half-hearted narrative, James simply describes his ideas freed of it, as in ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’.
• Most important, of his non-ghost ‘ghosts’, a disproportionate number have appurtenances of the Weird, and read now as startlingly teratologically ahead of their time. His apparitions are hairy (‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’), chitinous (‘The Ash-Tree’), slimy and/or amphibious (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’), totally bizarre (‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’), and more than once, tentacled (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Count Magnus’).
Today’s ghost stories are, overwhelmingly, exclusively hauntological, their figures revenant dead in time out of joint.(41) This tradition misremembers itself into existence. Many of its claimed foundation texts can only be so anointed in an act of heroic misrepresentation. Neurotically insistent on his own status as a ghost-story writer James may have been (the titles of his collections reiterate: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories …, (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories
gVoyaient Spankingsweetbaremaids Comment A%3E%3C Strong%3E%20on%20July%2021 %202009%20%3Cbr%20 %3E%20at%202:59%20pm%3C P%3E%3Cp%3E%3Ca%20rel Spanking Sweet Bare Maids M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire | China Miéville | Weird Fiction Reviewk Spanking Sweet Bare Maids Spanking Sweet Bare Maids
mVoyaient Spankingsweetbaremaids Comment A%3E%3C Strong%3E%20on%20July%2021 %202009%20%3Cbr%20 %3E%20at%202:59%20pm%3C P%3E%3Cp%3E%3Ca%20rel Spanking Sweet Bare Maids M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire | China Miéville | Weird Fiction Reviewl Spanking Sweet Bare Maids Cccccc54321%40lavabit.com Spanking Sweet Bare Maids