I should probably begin by assuring sceptical readers that I have never seen a ghost, and therefore have no strong opinions on their existence or otherwise. And yet. In our previous home, a flat in an 18th century house in pre-gentrification Whitechapel, my wife, her brother and our flatmate all independently claimed to hear voices talking on the otherwise empty top floor (the flatmate moving out almost immediately afterward) — and even, once, a soft voice gently shushing our crying baby son back to sleep.
On a T.A. course, over a decade ago, in the officer’s mess of Prince William of Gloucester Barracks in Grantham, a hungover colleague complained at breakfast of being woken during the night by a figure in RAF uniform. The mess staff, glancing at each other, alerted us to the story of the base’s purported ghost, an RAF airman killed in a wartime accident, whose presence, it transpired, was only ever experienced in my friend’s room.
That last tale is perhaps unsurprising: ghosts, should they exist, seem to be curiously institutionalised figures, adhering to schools, hospitals and museums, the London Underground and military installations. The Army, in particular, has a surprisingly rich and detailed ghost lore about its various historic barracks across Britain and, formerly, Germany. In this, we can say there’s something particularly British about ghosts: like our establishment, they seem doomed to wander forlornly across one Gothic quadrangle or another for eternity.
The essential Britishness of the ghost is worthy of consideration: this country, and all its constituent nations, shares with Ireland an extremely rich and highly evolved corpus of ghostly tales and claimed sightings compared to our European neighbours. No wonder, then, that the writer Peter Ackroyd claimed, in The English Ghost, that “the English see more ghosts than anyone else.” And yet, while “the word is of Anglo-Saxon derivation… curiously enough, the Anglo-Saxons did not see ghosts.” Is our ghost tradition a distant memory, suspended in the nocturnal gloom, of our island’s Celtic past? Through it, is England still, in some ghostly fashion, a Celtic nation? After all, as Ackroyd notes, boggart — the traditional northern English term for ghostly apparitions — like bogeyman, the Cornish Bucca and Shakespeare’s Puck all derive from the Brythonic word for ghost, bwg.
Perhaps it is more relevant to note, as Ackroyd does, that “the English are also in many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national television, and where every town and village has its own local historian.” The ghost, then, can perhaps be understood as the unconscious national understanding that the past is not dead, nor even truly past. We are haunted by our history, with a pleasing frisson, like no other nation on earth. Perhaps we can go further, and ask: are ghosts reactionaries? Suspended between past and present, retreading the forgotten ways of history, they are not simply residual echoes of the past, but exist purely in tension with modernity.
This tension between past and present, tradition and modernity can most clearly be seen in the tales of England’s greatest writer of ghost stories, M. R. James. The son of an East Anglian curate, his life’s path circumscribed, through his own choice, by the quadrangles of Eton, King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton again, Montague Rhodes James haunted the institutions of Edwardian England at a time of great and unbearable change. Like the fussy dons or stolid sons of the East Anglian squirearchy who peopled his tales, James was troubled by a dimly perceived force at the very edge of his vision which threatened to bring great horror to his world: modernity.
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SubscribeFascinating essay, thank you Aris.
Especially interesting as It seems to me that there is a parallel between the Reformation – the violent suppression of a whole Catholic way of life which had developed for over a thousand years, replaced with the new Calvinist Protestantism; and the Identity Politics, hate crime legislation, Woke ethos which has taken over in our time, where we are supposed to pay lip service to ideas and lies or lose jobs, careers and reputations.
The Reformation was brutal totalitarianism and it happened here in Britain 500 years ago, there’s no reason why it cannot happen again. The Woke agenda is authoritarian at the moment, but as Rod Dreher’s opinion piece points out the threat of totalitarianism is in Scotland right now.
Perhaps the British ghost tradition stems partly from the trauma of the Reformation indeed. One of the most seminal ghost stories appeared at that time c.1600 – the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play. It has been argued by Clare Asquith that the ghost represents the soul of England demanding justice for the Old Religion.
Well said. For all sorts of profound psychological reasons, traditional Catholicism offered comfort where Calvin gave nothing but anxiety. Catholics could pray for their dead – Calvinists couldn’t. Catholics had a host of rituals to ward off anxiety – Calvinists didn’t. Catholics could turn to many human comforters from priests and mystics to saints in heaven – Calvinists had an abstract, severe and remote notion of God. Worse, where Catholics could hope that repentance and amendment might spare them Hell, Calvinists were terrorised by the thought that they could do nothing to alter their predestined fate – a fear that drove several Calvinists stark mad. And the very worst is this: that where the human need for comfort and ritual is made public and harmless by Catholicism, Calvinism, because it denies such a need entirely drives that need into private and purely superstitious observances which readily turn – again – towards madness. M. R. James is ambiguous in his response to Catholicism and ritual. He was in fact a convinced protestant, like Dickens; but like Dickens, his subconscious is full of Catholic yearning and this does indeed emerge from his fiction, albeit in twisted form – just like the rituals which Keith Thomas noted rising in the immediate wake of the Reformation. As to Hamlet – yes – remember that the Ghost is right; that the ghost is therefore not a “goblin damned” and that hence it must come from Purgatory, not Hell. The flights of angels which sing the Prince to his rest are offering a Catholic descant in a choir which is not “bare” or “ruin’d”.
Thank you for expanding so well and in more depth, that’s very interesting.
Well, thank you both, Claire and Simon. Really interesting insights from you both.
An excellent essay – thank you very much.
I must say I think this is one of the most interesting subjects going. So much of modernity is an attempt to draw a bright line between ourselves and the people who came before, and to see ourselves as a new kind of people living in a fundamentally different and improved time. We are desperate to keep ourselves separate from people in “the old days”, and to reassure ourselves that we are safe in the egalitarian, electrically-lit, hygienic present.
It seems our efforts to maintain that illusion are becoming increasingly superstitious and neurotic. Without wishing to be boringly topical, I think that’s at the root of our reaction to the Covid business; we thought disease epidemics belonged to the old days, and to the world of black and white photographs of Spanish Flu patients, so we are falling over ourselves to make this a thoroughly modern epidemic so as to maintain that delusion.
I became a Catholic (and to attend the traditional Latin Mass) partly because I think that is the only way that we can heal this part of ourselves. The only real alternative to haunted modernity is the Communion of Saints.
Thanks for this very interesting comment, Edward. Like you I am a convert to traditional Catholicism, though in my case mainly owing to the Real Presence and the Apostolic Succession.
And I am another convert to the Faith, perhaps for both the reasons given by Edward and you. Certainly history played a great role. Now we are seeing the return to barbaric paganism and superstition, which seems to be the inevitable result of the loss of the true Faith in the Reformation and the so called Age of Reason.
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis.
Thanks for this, Aris. It is rich and thoughtful, as your essays tend to be.
I have never seen our present turmoil summed up as being ‘modernity in crisis’, which is odd – it seems like a pithy and useful way of phrasing it. Part of me wonders, though, whether the creature Modernity isn’t perfectly content with how things are going.
Excellent essay; thank you. The first James story I read was “The Mezzotint” and it absolutely terrified me.
I love James but acknowledge he has a tendency to write the same story over and over again; that’s not a criticism, but an observation. Same thing with Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead: all the songs are ultimately the same, but it’s still a good song.
If any James fans are looking to branch out, try L. P. Hartley, Robert Aickman, Edward Lucas White, John Metcalfe.
Thank you for the recommendations: anyone who likes The Mezzotint has reliable taste! It’s one of my favourites.
It is utterly horrifying because it is all about passive observation. Most horror stories work by making the reader identify with the protagonist and then placing the protagonist in a situation of danger. The Mezzotint works by placing the protagonist in a position of safety and having him learn about horrific events of the past, which he can do nothing to change. The knowledge itself is the horror. James really pulled off a coup with it.
Might be the iconic horror story of the Internet/social media/post-legitimate-democracy era. You can learn almost anything; you can change almost nothing.
I haven’t read White or Metcalfe, but I will certainly look them up.
Aickman had a lot of short stories in the “Pan” paperback series back in the day, but I always found him to be both predictable and vastly over-rated.
Walter de la Mare wrote some very understated tales, which relied almost entirely on atmosphere – All Hallows, Seaton’s Aunt and Mr Kempe are particularly good.