Reading Rooms: M.R. James and the Library of Modernity

Abstract

If we were to read the development of Gothic fiction through its objects of terror, from giant helmets to serial killers, then M. R. James would be hard to place. While he occasionally does make use of traditional Gothic conventions--two of his stories, "Count Magnus" and "Wailing Well," are populated by that familiar monster of Victorian horror, the vampire; in other stories he includes a number of troglodytic characters resembling Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde; and some monstrous spiders appear in "The Ash Tree"--usually James's creatures are more difficult to categorize. Sometimes they lurk in the uncanny objects of the everyday: curtains, prayer books, rolls of linen, and bedclothes all take on a ghostly animation. More often it is hard to say precisely of what the phobic objects consist, as they rarely take on material form. James is a master of the unexplained supernatural, not so much in luring the reader into a bewildering and impossible choice of explanations, as Henry James does in The Turn of the Screw, but in seeming almost willfully unconcerned with the provision of any explanation at all. In "Rats," a short story from his Collected Ghost Stories (1931), James draws attention to this tendency by opening with an epigraph from Charles Dickens's story "Tom Tiddler's Ground": "'And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you'd see the ragged, mouldy bedclothes a-heaving and a-heaving like seas.' 'And [End Page 749] a-heaving and a-heaving with what?' he says. 'Why, with the rats under 'em.'" But in line with the perverse anti-logic of James's later tales, when the story itself commences it turns out not to be about the "Rats" of the title at all: "But was it with the rats? I ask, because in another case it was not. I cannot put a date to the story, but I was young when I heard it, and the teller was old. It is an ill-proportioned tale, but that is my fault not his" (341). And, contrary to the reception of James as a master of the "well-made tale," "Rats" is ill-proportioned, with an extensive and somewhat repetitive buildup to a conventional "what's behind the locked door?" plot, followed by a cursory explanation about an executed murderer whose animated corpse may have been spotted. 1