by Sam Wiseman, University of Potsdam
In the fiction of M.R. James, landscape functions as a device to represent and explore the world of the imagination. This is particularly true of his most famous story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, in which the setting—a stretch of East Anglian shingle beach, caught between land and sea—functions as a liminal realm, which does not belong fully to one world or another. The region’s elemental instability allows James to emphasize the inadvertent exploration of other thresholds by his protagonist, Parkins: between fiction/imagination and “reality”, the sublime and the comprehensible, the oceanic and the cultural, and the animistic and scientific. In the story’s most uncanny and frightening scene, Parkins finds himself trapped in a liminal psychological state—neither dreaming nor waking—in which the region’s landscape and weather both play a key metaphorical and atmospheric role in establishing a feeling of destabilization. It is this sense of suspension between realms, I argue, that creates the story’s distinctive power: it is typically Jamesian in its ultimate cautionary moral, one which warns of the dangers of investigating/eroding boundaries between categories, and which uses its haunting coastal landscape as a corresponding image to this message.