"am i happy too, i havent checked :)))" "mycroft is the name you gave me. if you could possibly struggle all the way to the end" mark i am sending you kisses
As previously alluded to, another quote dump from the M. R. James essay book I'm reading.
As Simon MacCulloch details in his essay The Toad in the Study, the worlds of M. R. James's ghost stories are akin to the settings of Lovecraft. There is a primal, ancient, powerful universe and here we live, trying to abide its rules. For Jamesian protagonists, they investigate the underlying mycelium at great peril to themselves. Modern men spurn their fear of the supernatural; kid themselves that they need only society and logic. They are torn apart for imposing their reasoning on older, more eldritch beasts.
MacCulloch draws a parallel with the world of Stephen King's 'The Stand'. Here, King says that when rationalism fails, there remains "a hard God, a jealous God" who "always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it." MRJ takes a similar stance, with wretched unnatural forces that are strong, hidden, and unforgiving. Eurus, like the God of the Old Testament, is a jealous God, a "terrible" wind set to cleanse the world. She is the ghost in Sherlock's past and the demon beneath the road, and she represents some form of Revelation as well as the chaos of nature long-repressed.
I say this in light of Ron Weighell's introduction to MRJ's Apochyphal studies:
"Apocalypse is a transliteration of the Greek word for revelation, and all such writings claim to reveal hidden things seen in visions. Their language is symbolic, every element - animals, parts of the body, numbers, stars, colours and garments - requiring translation in the light of initiated knowledge."
Weighell writes in 'Dark Devotions' about magical tradition and the way we interact with the supernatural. He focusses on "…the continuing power and influence of ancient ritual…" and touches on "…demons … capable of telling "Where treasures be hid"". This brings to my mind The Musgrave Ritual, a story that bears resemblance to one of my favourites of MRJ's: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas. The ritual in TFP is in some ways closer to that of Abbot Thomas, which is an ancient skip code pointing to cursed treasure hidden down a well, than it is to its own canon.
Weighell goes on:
"It is a worldwide belief, from New Guinea to Greenland, that the wind indicates the presence of a demonic being. In the middle and far east, to whistle is still to invite molestation by the 'storm fiend'. Whistling was considered particaularly inauspicious on or near the sea."
He discusses the use of mazes in summoning rituals.
"Following the paths of a maze was a means of ritual invocation akin to dance."
In TAB, we see Eustace follow his ghost into the misty maze where he recieves his fate. Dracula's castle is a maze, Culverton's hospital is a maze; Sherrinford (and Musgrave Hall at its centre) can be considered a maze.
"In pagan teachings, the maze also symbolised the illusions of the lower world through which man searches for his soul."
What can I say except "the roads we walk have demons beneath" and "the man you are today is your memory of Eurus". Possibly a little "nothing made me. I made me ... Redbeard?".
Like Mycroft's fear of Eurus, like Sherlock's fear of "feelings", there exists a "…Christian fear of pagan knowledge. As Lawrence points out, the instinctive policy has been, and still is, either suppression, destruction, or denial."
I'm going to bed now lol but I will leave this with some fun quotes from 'The Rules of Folklore' by Jaqueline Simpson. These are just about general British and/or Danish folklore.
"…the ghost or fiend in the form of a dog…"
"generally the revenant is forced into a bottle which is then thrown into water, or else banished to the Red Sea"
"…if the ghost is released by uprooting its stake, it may manifest itself as a sinister "night-raven""
"In the end, as with the problem of justice, James offers a difficult choice between order maintained by clinging to an old position that no longer fully meets our needs and the chaos that we risk admitting by abandoning it." Simon MacCulloch, The Toad in the Study
Just intended as a short post to get one of the smaller brainworms out of my head. :)
Pulled this quote from my M. R. James notes. MacCulloch talks of the rigid, artificial order which is the domain of the scholars in James's stories, as juxtaposed against the unknown chaos of the natural - or supernatural - world. I think that the former could be one of Holmes's most Victorian traits; his criticisms of the romance in Watson's works disallow for the true fact that the romance was there. In TAB, we see Sherlock certain that there are no ghosts, and his subconsious drives him mad seeking to prove him wrong.
In "the eternal dilemma of the scholar, whereby a too narrow field of enquiry produces clear-cut but fragile conclusions, while a too wide one prevents us from settling upon a conclusion at all", Holmes tends to lean towards the former.
MacCulloch later states:
"James's response may be summed up as sensible map making. Refusal to draw borders banishes us to wilderness; refusal to see beyond them reduces us to unreality. But by saying "Here be dragons," we create a valid context in which to set a sense of belonging - we make home real."
I see Holmes's attitude in this regard to apply not only to case facts, but also to his historical, fear-based aversion to romance. Just like James's ghosts and the hounds of Baskerville, the spectre of wild nature and chaos can very easily exist as a manifestation of repressed queerness, as well as the fear of it. This is the reason I displayed the quote across the chess promo images - the history and present of Sherlock's love life (as a show and a character) is a conversation that also involves John and Mark, and in some ways Mycroft and that which he represents.
Perhaps this is belabouring the point, but the problem laid out above also ties in to the act of adapting old media to begin with. As James himself wrote:
"…it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator." *
The further removed from the setting that a reader is, the less they can empathise with the soul inside of it. In updating the Holmes stories, Mark and Moff aimed to blow away the cobwebs and present the core anew, translated for a contemporary audience.
Some of James's stories, MacCulloch writes, centre "the interaction of the past with the present ... where the unnaturally prolonged survival itself" of someone is the source of the horror. This brought to mind Amy's Bond thesis; Sherlock Holmes as a character has been around for a long time, who carries this unnatural weight with him because of it. Sometimes it feels as though his stasis as a vaguely-queer-but-not-really entity is a function of his fictional body being kept on ice and displayed in shows.
Michael A. Mason writes also about the skeptical and prescriptive order which the modern Victorian imposed on their world, in comparison to the previously prevalent belief in traditional folklore:
"However, since this new unbelief did not seem to make the world more tolerable, perhaps tales of the uncanny might, in a limited way, minister to psychological necessities inherited by modern man from his ignorant forefathers."
I think that it is from a similar vein that Mark and Moff have drawn in carrying forward the queercoding and subtext into their show, to the extreme. There is certainly an aspect of it which maintains the connection to the source; a connection which we would feel the absence of in an adaptation that exclusively shows explicit queerness between Holmes and Watson with none of the yellow fog at the window pane, so to speak. Despite their intentions to prove the subtext-only method outdated, it remains an enticing part of why we all care so much to examine the show, sometimes against our own better judgements.
Anyway! This was meant to just be a vent post about the initial quote lol. I hope some of this was interesting to read. :) I'll hopefully have a more concrete and brainwormy post sometime soon, as well as another post in the style of this one, about Eurus. All quotes can be found in 'Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James'.
* Worth noting that this quote brought to mind the Victorian setting of TAB, which bridges the gap between the relatively-grounded series 3 and the Verfremdungseffekted series 4.
