Les voyages dans les ghost stories de Montagu Rhodes James : à la découverte d’horizons inattendus

This paper will examine the meaning and modalities of travelling and « the horizon » in five ghost stories from M. R. James’s 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary featuring erudite Englishmen, most of whom Oxbridge academics and researchers, specialising in archaeology or history. These prim and fussy bachelors embark on their scholarly field studies in a very buoyant mood, hoping to make key discoveries in situ although the prospect of travelling somewhat disturbs them, the more so as four out of five of them have to go abroad and stay at foreign inns or hotels... As a matter of fact, James perpetuates the period Gothic tradition whereby foreign countries — and more especially « Papist » ones — symbolise danger and threat. Moreover, as could be expected in ghost stories, in which anxiety and terror are prerequisites of the genre, the characters’ journeys will not have gratifying intellectual results but will be traumatic and lead to unpalatable intimate discoveries. All five characters experience something terrifying, descend into literal and metaphoric depths, and one of them even meets his death because of it. But ironically, even if the things or creatures that menace them initially seem alien to them, they turn out to be part of them, as in Freud’s uncanny.