I don’t think any writer has handled a narrator in quite the same way as James in “Oh, Whistle.” For the narrator here is not merely a disembodied authorial voice in the classic nineteenth-century manner. He is involved in the lives of the characters he describes, he knows them, he sees them on a regular basis—he is, albeit invisibly, a character in the story, cut from the same cloth, as it were, as Professors Parkins and Rogers and the rest of the St. James faculty. There are portions of the story, he suggests, that could be told, that actually happened—most of them having to do with the game of golf—but which he gratefully lacks the expertise to set down. This accords with a fundamental operation of the supernatural story, from “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” to The Blair Witch Project, which is to make the explicit point—generally implicit or finessed in “literary” fiction—that what is being given is a factual account. All ghost stories are “true” stories. We love them, if we love them, from the depth and antiquity of our willingness to believe them.
M. R. James, more than any other writer, explores the wobble, the shimmer of uncertainty that results when quotation marks are placed around the word “true.” Because at the same time that the narrator of “Oh, Whistle” is implicating himself in his story—scrupulously telling us what he has seen for himself and what parts of the story he has only heard second- or third-hand—his supremely “authoritative” voice and evident easy control over the materials establish him as unmistakably the writer of the story, its inventor, hurrying us past characters we need not overly attend to, rendering the events with an impossible familiarity. This, in turn, calls into question the fictional status of the narrator, and hence that of the author himself.
All of this, I know, sounds dubiously postmodern. And indeed James, not merely in his approach, at once careful and cavalier, to point of view, but also in fitting out his stories with the full apparatus of scholarly research (footnotes, learned quotations from Latin, references to obscure medieval tracts), often anticipates Borges and the postmodernists—and with every iota of their self-conscious playfulness. But the playfulness is worn so lightly, and the experiments in point of view are undertaken with such a practical purpose—scaring you—in mind, that even a critical reader may scarcely be aware of them the first time through. James is like some casual, gentleman tinkerer yoking a homemade antigravity drive to the derailleurs of his bicycle because he is tired of being late to church every Sunday.
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is, in many ways, the prototypical M. R. James story. It presents a man who stumbles, through benevolent motives, upon a historical puzzle that cannot fail to interest him and, poking innocently around in it, inadvertently summons—more literally here than in other stories—an unexpected revenant of a bygone time, with frightful results. Professor Parkins—“rather hen-like, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect”—kindly agrees to take time away from his golfing vacation on the Suffolk coast in order to investigate the ruins, in the neighborhood where he plans to stay, of an old Knights Templar church in which one of his colleagues takes a scholarly interest. Parkins, we have seen, is an avowed skeptic when it comes to the supernatural—to a fault, perhaps. Digging with his pocketknife in the earth around the ruins, he uncovers a strange metal flute bearing an enigmatic Latin inscription. When—as inevitably he must—Parkins plays a few notes on the flute, he calls up a series of increasingly terrifying disturbances, both atmospheric and psychic: winds, night terrors, and puzzling disarrangements or disturbances of the second, supposedly empty bed in his room at the Globe Inn. These disturbances culminate in the awful apparition—a marvel of James’s gift for creating horror through understatement and suggestion—of a thing, some thing, with a woeful face of crumpled bed linens.
For this story is also prototypical James in that when at last we encounter the Horror, there is something about its manifestation, its physical attributes, its habits, that puts the reader in mind, however reluctantly, of sex. I say reluctantly in part because the cool, fleshy, pink, protruberant, furred, toothed, or mouthed apparitions one finds in M. R. James are so loathsome; and in part because James keeps his stories studiously free—swept clean—not merely of references to sexual behavior but of all the hot-and-heavy metaphor and overt Freudian paraphernalia with which supernatural fiction is so often encumbered. James is a hospitable writer, and one wishes not to offend one’s host. But the fact remains that “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is a story about a man pursued into the darkness of a strange bedroom, and all of the terror is ultimately generated by a vision of a horribly disordered bed. The bodily horror, the uncanny, even repulsive nature of sex—a favorite theme of the genre from Stoker to Cronenberg—is a recurring element in the stories of M. R. James, rendered all the more potent because it feels so genuinely unconscious. Sex was undoubtedly the last thing on the mind of M. R. James as he sat down to compose his Christmas creepers, but it is often the first thing to emerge when the stays of reality are loosened.
At times, as in traditional ghost stories (e.g., “A Christmas Carol”), James’s characters engender and deserve their ghastly fates, bringing them about through excesses of ambition, pride, or greed. Professor Parkins, one senses, does not entirely meet with the author’s approval—he is priggish, skeptical, he plays golf—but in other stories the protagonists are men whose profession, temperament, and tastes barely distinguish them from their creator. Most of the time they are innocents, ignorant trippers and travelers who brush up against the omnipresent meaningless malevolence of the world, and the sins for which they are punished tend, likely as not, to be virtues—curiosity, honesty, a sympathy for bygone eras, a desire to do honor to one’s ancestors. And, often, their punishment is far grimmer than the scare that Professor Parkins receives.
The secret power of James’s work lies in his steadfast refusal to explain fully, in the end, the mechanisms that have brought about the local irruption of Evil he describes, and yet to leave us, time and again, utterly convinced that such an explanation is possible, if only we were in possession of all the facts. He makes us feel the logic of haunting, the residue of some inscrutable chain of ghostly causation, though we can’t—though, he insists, we never will be able to—explain or understand that logic. In “Oh, Whistle” the elements—the Templars’ ruined church, the brass flute with its fragmentary inscriptions, the blind pursuing figure in white, the whistled-up wind—all hang together seamlessly in the reader’s imagination: they fit. And yet, in the end, we have no idea why. For the central story of M. R. James, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of “reality,” of all the structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from our constant nagging suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning. It is hard to conceive of a more serious theme, or a more contemporary plot, than this.
It may be, in fact, that the ghost story, like the dinosaur, is still very much with us, transformed past the point of ready recognition into the feathered thing that we call “the modern short story.” Perhaps all short stories can be understood as ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past. Were there ever characters in fiction more haunted by ghosts than Chekhov’s or Joyce’s?
The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad. Ultimately all stories—ghost stories, mysteries, stories of terror or adventure or modern urban life—descend from the fireside tale, told with wolves in the woods all around, with winter howling at the window. After centuries of the refinements, custom fittings, and mutations introduced by artistry and the marketplace, the short story retains its fundamental power to fright
en us with its recognition of the abyss at our backs, and to warm us with its flickering light.
* “ ‘I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full term is over, Professor,’ said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St James’s College.”
LANDSMAN OF THE LOST
LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I was first apprised of the wistful and intrepid pilgrimage of Mr. Julius Knipl by Lawrence Weschler, in his 1993 New Yorker profile of Ben Katchor, creator of the last great American comic strip.
It is a sad duty to thus anoint Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Perhaps no art form has ever flourished so brilliantly only to decline into such utter debasement, in such a brief period of time, as the newspaper strip. Reading the comics page in 1996, exactly one hundred years after the debut of Outcault’s Yellow Kid, is, for those who still bother, half melancholy habit and half sentimental adherence to duty, a daily running up of a discredited flag in a forsaken outpost of an empire that collapsed.
Weschler’s article dwelt at length, as do most comments on Katchor, on the artist’s preoccupation with the sensuous residuum of the past, those unexpected revelators of the all-but-forgotten, encountered in the stairwell of a hard-luck office building or on the grimy shelves of a decrepit pharmacy, those stray remnants of an earlier time that are hinted at in the surname of his protagonist, the stoop-shouldered wanderer, meditative soul, and former dance instructor Mr. Julius Knipl. And it is true that celebration of the chance survival, the memory wrapped like a knipl, or nest egg, in a beaded purse of forgetfulness discovered in the back of a drawer, is the most immediately striking and perhaps the most accessible aspect of the strip. It was this aspect, initially, that led me to track down Katchor’s first collection of strips, Cheap Novelties, and—the spell was on me now—to take out a subscription to Forward, then the flagship paper of the scattershot and fluctuating Knipl syndicate. I’m a sucker, myself, for such chance survivals, because as I’ve confessed elsewhere I suffer intensely from bouts, at times almost disabling, of a limitless, all-encompassing nostalgia, extending well back into the years before I was born.
The mass synthesis, marketing, and distribution of versions and simulacra of an artificial past, perfected over the last thirty years or so, has ruined the reputation and driven a fatal stake through the heart of nostalgia. Those of us who cannot make it from one end of a street to another without being momentarily upended by some fragment of outmoded typography, curve of chrome fender, or whiff of lavender hair oil from the pate of a semiretired neighbor are compelled by the disrepute into which nostalgia has fallen to mourn secretly the passing of a million marvelous quotidian things.
The erasure of the past and its replacement by animatronic replicas, politicians’ narratives, and the fictions of advertisers, coupled with the explosive proliferation of new inventions and altered mores, ought to have produced a boom time for honest mourners of the vanished. Instead we find ourselves haunting the margins of a world loud with speculators in metal lunch boxes and Barbie dolls, postmodernists, and retro-rockers, quietly regretting the alternate chuckling and sighs of an old-style telephone when you dialed it. We are not, as our critics would claim, necessarily convinced that things were once better than they are now, nor that we ourselves, our parents, or our grandparents were happier “back then.” We are simply like those savants in the Borges story who stumble upon certain objects and totems that turn out to be the random emanations and proofs of the existence of Tlön. The past is another planet; anyone ought to wonder, as we do, at any traces of it that turn up on this one.
Every week in the eight panels of a new installment of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Ben Katchor manages to teleport the reader to a particular urban past—a crumbling, lunar cityscape of brick and wire which was young and raucous in the heyday of the Yellow Kid. It’s a world of rumpled suits, fireproof office blocks with the date of their erection engraved on the pediment, transom windows, and harebrained if ingenious small businesses; a sleepless, hacking-cough, dyspeptic, masculine world the color of the stained lining of a hat. (This world, in its dreamlike, at times almost dadaistic particulars, may not ever, precisely, have existed; and yet a walk through the remaining grimy, unrenovated, simulacrum-free streets of any old American downtown, with their medical-supply showrooms, flophouses, theosophical book depositories, and 99-cent stores, can be a remarkably persuasive argument for the documentary force of Katchor’s work.)
But Katchor is far more than a simple archaeologist of outmoded technologies and abandoned pastimes. In fact he often plays a kind of involuted Borgesian game with the entire notion of nostalgia itself, proving that one can feel nostalgia not only for times before one’s own but, surprisingly, for things that never existed. Not content, or perhaps, in this age of debased nostalgia, too rigorous an artist to evoke merely the factual elements of a vanished past so easily appropriated by admen and Republican candidates, Katchor carefully devises a seemingly endess series of regrets, in the heart of Julius Knipl, for things not only gone or rapidly disappearing, such as paper straws and television aerials, but also wholly imaginary: the Vitaloper, the Directory of the Alimentary Canal, tapeworm sanctuaries, a once well-known brand of aerosol tranquilizer.
As, over the weeks, I joined Mr. Knipl in his peregrinations, I discovered that the strip’s wonderful evocation of an entirely plausible and heartbreaking if only partly veracious past is not the greatest of its pleasures or achievements. Ben Katchor is an extremely clever, skillful, and amusing storyteller.
With the exception of mute strips such as Henry and The Little King, the comic strip is and has always been a literary form that braids words and pictures inextricably into a story. In the so-called Golden Age of the comic strip, standards for both elements were often high; lately the pictures have dwindled to a bare series of thumbnail sketches, and while the notion of story has atrophied almost to nonexistence, most of the burden of humor or pathos now falls, for better or worse, on the words. But we have never—at least not since Herriman—had a writer like Katchor.
His polished, terse, and versatile prose, capable, in a single sentence strung expertly from a rhythmic frame of captions, of running from graceful elegy to police-blotter declarative to Catskill belly rumble, lays down the bare-bones elements, the newspaper-lead essentials of his story. As in all great strips, Katchor’s dialogue—the hybrid element unique to comics neither quite picture nor completely words—swelling perilously inside his crooked and deformed balloons, drives, embellishes, shanghais, and comments—generally ironically—on the story, his woebegone characters sometimes echoing the taciturn elegance of the captions, sometimes speaking in an entertaining mishmash of commercial travelers’ argot, Lower East Side expostulations, and the sprung accents of cheap melodrama.
None of this would mean anything, however, without Katchor’s artwork, running in perpetual counterpoint to and in tension with the captions and dialogue. Though his style in no way resembles that of either Jack Kirby or Will Eisner, Ben Katchor is along with them one of the three great depictors of New York City in the history of comics (Katchor’s city, nameless or whatever its name may be, is always plainly New York). It is a dark, at times almost submarine city, with antecedents in sources as divergent as the work of Hopper, De Chirico, and Ditko. Wide, deserted streets find themselves hemmed in on all sides by carefully not-quite-anonymous buildings. Late-night cafeterias extrude wan panels of light onto the sidewalks. Lonely news vendors stand beside dolmens of unsold papers.
Katchor’s style, like all the great styles, is addictive. His wobbly lines, woozy perspectives, and restless shifts in point of view; his intense exploitation of a narrow spectrum of ink washes running from soot to dirty rain; his use of detail at once lavish and superbly economical, painstaking, and apt; his lumbering, sad, hollow-eyed, jowly, blue-jawed men in their ill-fitting suits; his rare, mildly frightening women in their remarkab
le armor of trusses and lingerie—none of it is beautiful, or even, if I may be forgiven for saying so, masterly; the same could have been said about Herriman. In the funny papers a mastery of the vocabulary of comic drawing is more important than refinement of technique. Drawing skill matters only insofar as it helps the cartoonist tell his story.
The stories Katchor tells, mostly in eight or nine panels on a single page, occasionally spilling over onto two, three, or four pages (and wondrously, in the case of the longest and previously unpublished story in this collection, onto seventeen wild pages with an astonishing splash panel), fall, roughly, into seven categories. There are first of all the famous requiems for vanished places, sale items, novelties, and devices. There are episodes and accounts that serve to illuminate the ways and behaviors—from the Stasis Day Parade to the hazardous umbrella situation to the intricacies of Excursionist Drama—of the alternate Gotham in which Mr. Knipl makes his living. There are anecdotes and incidents taken from the lore of the local tradesmen, its hairstyle mappers, licensed expectorators, parked-car readers, and numerous cracked inventors. There are the odd, indirect, at times almost eventless stories so like dreams—the dreams beloved of readers of The Evening Combinator—that they linger and disturb. There are stories, inevitably but somehow incidentally, of Mr. Knipl himself, a lonely man in a city of lonely men, and stories of some of those other solitaires: Emmanuel Chirrup, Arthur Mammal, Carmine Delaps, Al Mooner.
In the end it isn’t nostalgia but loneliness of an impossible beauty and profundity that is the great theme of Knipl. Katchor’s city is a city of men who live alone in small apartments, tormented by memories, impracticable plans, stains on the ceiling. Small wonder, then, that they should so eagerly band together over and over again into the fantastic and prodigious array of clubs, brotherhoods, retirement communities, and secret societies, accounts of which make up the seventh category of Knipl story. “Fellowship,” as a loyal member of the Holey Pocket League tells Mr. Knipl, “is the only thing we crave.”