Excerpts From "Some Remarks on Ghost Stories"
by Montague Rhodes James
originally published in The Bookman
Christmas Issue, December 1929
(from which can be gleaned some certain criteria for the Jamesian Ghost Story)
Overview and Synopsis by Frank Coffman
Professor of English and Journalism
Rock Valley College, Rockford, Illinois
M.(ontague) R.(hodes) James is generally acknowledged as England's Master of the Ghost Story and a specialist in that distinct genre of literature of horror and the supernatural. In a short article for The Bookman for the Christmas Issue (December 1929), James gives a short reading list, a sort of select bibliographic history of the "avowedly fictitious ghost story" -- which was his subject.
Woven into his commentary are some remarks that delineate the Jamesian criteria for ghostly fiction. These I have excerpted in quotation below:
point 1: The Pretense of Truth
While James says early in the article that he is concerned with the "avowedly fictitious" type of story, he notes in opening that "Very nearly all the ghost stories of old times claim to be true narratives of remarkable occurrences." Elsewhere in the article, however, we find his evident dislike of both the explained-away-by-rational-means variety of ghost and also of the it-was-all-a-dream variety of story. So, to be a true ghost story: The ghostliness or supernatural quality must not be explained away. Even though it is fictitious, it must be presented as fact to be truly frightening.
point 2: "A Pleasing Terror"
In likely the most important statement of the article, in what amounts to a functional definition of the ghost story, James maintains that "the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader . . . is the true aim of the ghost story." This notion of "sole object" is very close to Poe's "single effect" in his definition of the short story form in the famous and important essay on Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales.
point 3: No Gratuitous Bloodshed or Sex
James uses the word "blatancy" for the kind of needless excess of violence and bloodshed in much of the material of his day. He argues that anything more than "a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation" is excessive and that there is no place for gratuitous gore in the Ghost Story as he envisions its true form. Certainly this is true in his own stories [see Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary].. So too, he argues against the tendency, emerging in his day, to "drag in too much sex, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels, in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it." James seemed to believe that this sort of the horrific was too easy to achieve -- sort of cheap thrills.
point 4: No "Explanation of the Machinery"
James writes, "the greatest successes have been scored by the authors who can make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail, but who, when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of [the] theory of the supernatural."
point 5: Setting: "Those of the Writer's (and Reader's) Own Day"
James maintains: "The setting and personages are those of the writer's own day; they have nothing antique about them . . . . this mode is not absolutely essential to success, but it is characteristic of the majority of successful stories . . . . the seer of ghosts must talk something like me, and be dressed, if not in my fashion, yet not too much like a man in a pageant, if he is to enlist my sympathy." In other words, contemporary setting -- to both writer and, hence, reader is essential to bring the fear home. Stories set long ago and/or far away won't chill us as much as the ones to which we can relate.
So, James presents us, indirectly, with a brief theoretical perspective on the Ghost Story. His essay is also a good briefly annotated historical bibliography of Ghost Story fiction.