The Moi-Même Voice:

M.R. James and the Art of Intimate Distance

My dear literary spirit,

This is the month of MRJ’s death. He died 12 June 1936, exactly 25 years after his father’s death on 12 June 1909. To mark the occasion, let us consider Monty’s ‘personally impersonal’ narrative style wherein he inserts himself into his stories without actually inserting himself into his stories.

In the scope of the English ghost story, there are few voices so deceptively casual, so finely turned to concealment and evocation, as that of Montague Rhodes James. He does not shout “Boo!” He does not rattle chains. He seldom raises his voice above that of the good-natured scholar swirling a whiskey whilst offering a polite chortle. But driving that seemingly companionable narrative presence is a chilling technique that I call the moi-même voice, and it lurks: a dread far more intimate than any gothic shriek.

The term moi-même comes, of course, from the French for “myself,” and I invoke it deliberately. James’s narrators rarely name themselves, and when they do, it is only with the softest pressure (and, when analyzed, they often resolve themselves into the voice of Monty himself . . . though not quite). They are almost always bookish men: reticent, inclined toward antiquarianism, and possessed of an “I” so understated that it is easy to overlook. But this, I would argue, is precisely the point. In James’s fiction, the narrator is neither fully James nor wholly a constructed mask. It is moi-même, that hybrid self who gestures toward the author without collapsing into autobiography. And that subtle slipperiness allows James to perform what is perhaps the most unnerving of all ghost story maneuvers: the reader’s slow realization that they are hearing a recollection, not a tale; that they have been seated beside a man who is not so much telling a story as remembering something that he has tried very hard to forget.

This technique is probably best understood if we remember that James did not write to be published. He wrote to read his works aloud to a circle of close friends during his Christmas celebrations. It therefore makes sense that he should couch those stories in the suggested notion that ‘this really occurred—to me’ if only to add an extra, chilling touch of veracity to his uncanny tales. Because, after all, ghost stories are more frightening if true.

We are not, however, in the realm of the first-person, narrative-character confessional, à la Poe (“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could”). Nor are we in the omniscient detachment of the classic gothic mode. Instead, James crafts narrators who speak from the margins: scholarly, hesitant, often relaying events that happened to someone else (and thank God, they imply, not to them)—but nevertheless to someone whom the unobtrusive narrator knows and believes. This device permits James to maintain a calculated distance from the supernatural, one that protects plausibility even as it sharpens the sting. The narrator need not prove or even entirely believe the events; he need only remember and relate them.

Consider the moment after the opening dialogue of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” A narrative voice intrudes quite suddenly to say,

"In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman—rather henlike, perhaps, in his little ways."

Who is this ‘I’ who refers to himself as ‘me’? He never obtrudes into the tale, never makes another self-reference, but there he is, telling the tale, and he was apparently personally present at the little dust-up that began the adventure. Might it have been Monty himself? Could this have actually occurred? James offers nothing but this breezy aside and then utterly refuses to identify our narrative observer. The story is already underway, the narrator already seated amongst friends, and we, the readers, are included only as far as our eavesdropping narrator can carry us. This is the moi-même voice at work: embedded, indirect, concerned less with performance than observation and recollection.

The result is a disarming proximity. We trust this narrator not because he is necessarily reliable, but because he so clearly wishes to avoid drama. When he relays a “curious” incident, we lean forward. When he admits that the facts are “perhaps open to interpretation,” we understand instinctively that they are not. And when he pauses to express distaste, or caution, or befuddlement, we do not feel manipulated but rather warned.

This is a hallmark of James’s art, and it is difficult to identify more than one or two of his stories that do not employ the subtle device in one form or another. The moi-même voice functions not simply as a narrative filter but as a form of epistemic restraint. It allows the story to feel partial, recovered, and, most importantly, never wholly understood . . . and yet possible. These could be tales murmured in confidence around firesides, in clubs, at academic dinners. They are offered with the caveat of memory and the tacit understanding that belief is beside the point. “Take it as you will,” the narrator implies. “But I, for one, would rather not speak of it again.”

Why? Because it happened.

And, so, the moi-même voice becomes, paradoxically, a form of revelation: not in what it tells but rather in what it withholds. It gestures toward trauma without sensationalizing it, allows the ghost its ambiguity, and honours the unspoken contract between teller and listener: that this story, whatever it is, has marked the speaker in some irrevocable manner that must now be shared.

There is a dignity in that restraint. It is the opposite of the modern horror trope that demands escalation and spectacle. James understands that the most chilling ghost stories are not those in which the dead are rather like the living (distinguished only by decayed or absent flesh), but rather those in which the living speak too quietly, as though afraid what they fear might return . . . with unknowable intentions. James’ narrator, after all, is moi-même—myself—and he inhabits the margins of the story. But only just . . . or is he merely part of the overall fiction?

Such is the narrative crux, and subtle genius, of the M.R. James ghost story.

Next month, we will delve into those elements of the Jamesian canon that betray the writer’s own anxieties . . . it was not spiders alone!

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan