Archive for October 28th, 2012

28 Oct

Ghost stories for dark winter nights

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Culture, literature. Tagged: , .

There’s a time and a place for reading a ghost story. You can’t, for instance, read a ghost story on a crowded commuter train. Nor can you read it on a sunny afternoon in the garden . No – a ghost story should be read late at night, in the light of a solitary lamp that is casting weird shadows around the room. One may be sitting comfortably in a favourite armchair; or one may be in bed, shortly before putting out the bedside lamp and submitting to the dark. The story is all the more effective if there is a howling wind outside, making eldritch sounds at the window-pane; or, better still, if there is a deathly, still, silence – a silence that one dreads being broken.

Recently, Tom in Wuthering Expectations – not, I believe, a diehard aficionado of the genre – has posted nonetheless very sympathetic accounts of some classic ghost stories. He identified different types of ghost stories, and quite rightly disagreed with my unargued assertion that the purpose of ghost stories is to evoke fear: a ghost story, he argued, could serve any number of functions. This is certainly true enough: but it’s the ones that evoke fear that I love the best. So, before I go on to prescribe, as I fully intend to do, what does and what doesn’t make for a good ghost story – or, at least, what makes for my kind of ghost story – I suppose I should describe the kind of ghost story I am talking about.

I am not really interested in ghost stories that are comic, or satirical: comedy may act as relief to lower the tension at appropriate moments, but I remain to be convinced that one may laugh and be frightened at the same time. Neither am I interested in ghost stories that seek to evoke disgust rather than fear – a common failing, I find, with much of modern horror. I like the creepy type of story – the type that evokes in me a sense of supernatural dread. It may be said, with some justification, that it’s a comfortable type of dread: it is easy to feel fear when safely ensconced in a nice, warm bed, especially when that fear is caused by beings one knows to be imaginary. That’s true enough. But, as I was reminded during a recent visit to Hermitage Castle, irrational fear, inexplicable dread, unreasoned terror, are all too real, even if ghosts and vampires aren’t. One may be perfectly rational and not believe in the supernatural, and yet find certain places to be, for want of a better word, spooky, and prefer not to be there after dark. Why we should feel this way, I do not know: but the finest ghost stories – or, to be more precise, the finest ghost stories of the type I like – do, I think, evoke something of just this sort of fear – a fear all the more unnerving because its object remains so shadowy and vague. And that is important: as soon as the objects of fear acquires too distinct a solidity, the fear that its vagueness had occasioned naturally dissipates.

This type of ghost story is, I think, a very conservative genre: its effectiveness usually comes from doing established things well, rather than from innovation. But since, as I have been told, and as I tend to agree, my cultural tastes are conservative anyway, I don’t have a problem with that. The master of the genre is, for me and for many others, M. R. James. What James understood so well is that the irrational is frightening for the very reason that it is irrational: it is precisely because the irrational irrupts into a solid and rational world that it terrifies. This is why I have never enjoyed the short stories of Poe very much: the framework of his stories is so far removed from the everyday, and the pitch is so hysterical to begin with, that when the irrational or the macabre does emerge, it is neither surprising nor incongruous.

And I think this is also why I tend not to enjoy stories in which some sort of rationale is provided for the haunting; or when some alternative plane of existence, perfectly in accordance with the laws of nature were we to be fully acquainted with these laws, is hypothesised to explain the apparition. I am happy to suspend my normal rational frame of mind when the irrational is depicted as irrational, but when that irrational is rationalised by an alternative type of reasoning, I find myself getting bored. I have read far too many ghost stories that have been spoiled by over-explaining: what matters is the projection of a sense of terror, and presentation of some parallel fantasy world that explains the apparently inexplicable merely diminishes that sense of terror.

Similarly with over-plotting: it is enough to know that phantoms haunt; we do not generally need to know why they haunt. There is nothing objectionable in suggesting some reason, but, once again, I have read far too many ghost stories that have been spoiled by too great an emphasis on this aspect: mere mechanics of the plot are rarely interesting, and the best ghost stories – once again, of the type I like – do not give us more of this than is absolutely necessary.

M. R. James knew exactly how to do it. In story after story, he got it just right – neither complete bafflement, nor too much explanation that would detract from the terror; the terror glimpsed, as he put it, “in the corner of the retina”; and just the right depiction of solidity to make the supernatural appear incongruous, and hence, shocking. After all, we all expect unspeakable horrors in a Gothic dungeon, but when you are in your own room and you slip your hand under the pillow to retrieve your watch, and … No, sorry, I’d better stop here: I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who has not yet read “Casting the Runes”.

As has often been remarked, the late Victorian and the Edwardian era – the era, in other words, in which M. R. James (and his namesake Henry James, who wrote probably the finest ghost story of them all) flourished – is the golden era for this type of story. Why this should be, I don’t know, although I am sure literary theorists have their own hypotheses on this matter: it’s probably all to do with social and economic changes, or something equally fascinating. But whatever the reason, the majority of the creepy stories I love were written in this period. And the sheer entertainment these stories have provided over the years has been immense.

As I write, we are just a few days away from Halloween, but Halloween was never – in the UK at least – a particularly major event as I was growing up, and it still doesn’t register particularly strongly with me. Traditionally, in Britain, it was Christmas that was the time for ghost stories. There is something about the darkening winter light in these latitudes that particularly lends itself to this sort of thing. But Halloween or Christmas – what matter? Now the time of year is approaching when I can once again enjoy reading these stories on dark nights before switching off the bedside lamp.

And then, the darkness.

28 Oct

“Coriolanus” revisited

Posted by argumentativeoldgit in Drama, literature, Shakespeare. Tagged: , , , .

And now, on to the second of the tragic beef-witted lords – Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

When I last read this play, I was puzzled. Why, after exploring some of the deepest aspects of human existence, did Shakespeare choose to end his sequence of tragedies with this?

That sequence had started some ten years earlier, with Julius Caesar. There are, admittedly, some earlier plays which may be considered tragedies: there’s the early Titus Andronicus, a play many Shakespeareans admit into the canon only with embarrassment, and excuse as being merely an early pot-boiler; and there is the exquisite Romeo and Juliet, which is in many ways closer to the comedies than to the later tragedies. There are a couple of history plays as well that may be considered tragedies – the demonic Richard III, and, a few years afterwards, the surprisingly lyrical Richard II. But despite these earlier forays, it was in 1599 that the great tragic sequence was set in motion by Julius Caesar, and soon, masterpiece followed masterpiece: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth – works regularly cited when we wish to refer to the very highest peaks of the literary imagination. And the sequence ended with two plays that seem to stand apart from the others in certain ways – Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. In the former, while not shirking the tragic, Shakespeare returned to the comic mode – and not merely as a means of providing relief: we are frequently invited to see the tragic protagonists themselves as comic figures, and, by the end, while we may sympathise or even empathise with these characters, we feel little sense of loss, little regret for what might have been. These are characters who never, even by the end, attain self-knowledge.

In Coriolanus, Shakespeare takes us a step further down this road: Coriolanus isn’t even aware that there is any self-knowledge that needs to be acquired. What puzzles Antony doesn’t even begin to puzzle him, because he has never so much as considered it. He treads his tragic path without for one moment recognising its tragic gravity, never so much as experiencing any sense of loss, or of regret. How easy it would have been for Shakespeare to have shown Coriolanus consciously and heroically sacrifice his life to a greater, nobler cause; but this Coriolanus is too thick even to realise that he is in any danger: he goes to his death as he has lived – without a thought, without reflection, without awareness. Antony and Cleopatra, for all their shortcomings, seek for and finally give themselves to a vision of transcendence: Coriolanus, far from having a vision of transcendence, does not even have an adequate vision of the world he inhabits. He cannot even feel any of the shame that had so consumed Sophocles’ Aias.

Apart from his physical courage, Coriolanus has no quality at all that is conducive either to sympathy or to admiration: merely a brute fighting machine, and no more. He does not even have in him any sense of patriotism: as soon as he is out of favour, he turns without compunction, without a thought, against the Rome that had formerly nurtured him. Any mental struggle is conspicuous only by its absence. The tragic sequence that had begun with the introspective Brutus and the intellectual Hamlet ends with this. What a curious trajectory!

And Shakespeare depicts all this in the most austere of terms. Where Antony and Cleopatra had overflowed with bright, vivid colours and with some of the most gorgeous poetry that even Shakespeare ever wrote, Coriolanus has virtually no poetry in it at all: much of the play is in blank verse, but there is not a single passage, not a single line, that finds a place in the memory – not mine, at any rate: such prosaic blank verse I have never seen. Far from the kaleidoscopic hues of Antony and Cleopatra, what we get here is an unrelieved gun-metal grey. At the climactic point of this play, Coriolanus’ mother and wife plead to him to relent; compare this to the scene in Measure for Measure, where Isabella pleads to Angelo to relent: Isabella’s pleas are some of the most passionate lines of dramatic verse ever committed to paper, and the depiction of the mental turmoil this occasions in Angelo is extraordinary in its corrosive power: and yet, the same author who wrote those scenes in Measure for Measure could write the climactic scene of Coriolanus without conveying any such passion, any such power. It is not because he couldn’t: on the evidence of the plays written immediately before and after, his poetic and dramatic genius had not by a jot deserted him. If he doesn’t invest these scenes in Coriolanus with passion and power, if he keeps his soaring poetic imagination earthbound, it is because this is what he wanted.

But why he should have wanted it so is beyond me. That this is indeed a great play I have no doubt: it is clearly the work of a master dramatist, fully in control of his art. But it continues to puzzle me.