ABSTRACT
The prototypes of all the best ghost stories, claimed Montague Rhodes James, 'were written in the sixties and seventies. James's own stories, which he began to write a generation after those dates, do seem to bear an unmistakably Dickensian hallmark, although, in fact, the Victorian 'tradition' of ghostly entertainment at Christmas they apparently recall was still then a fairly recent invention, dating from James's own childhood and the popularity of periodicals such as Charles Dicken's Household Words and All the Year Round. The pictographic swastika could therefore be seen as an apt figure of the semiotic torsion or dynamic objectal disfiguring of legibility at work in the story, the restless intrusion of a strange object that troubles its narrative surface. If the ghost story as reinvented by M. R. James, then, is 'antiquarian', it comes with none of the retrospective consolation or formal conservatism that such a term might be thought to imply.
