In Robert Aickman’s “The Cicerones” (1967) a tourist named John Trant is thrown out of a cathedral before it closes for the afternoon. This may be all that ever happens in this brief short story but it is very hard for the reader to see over or around Trant’s escalating paranoia. He himself will never number amongst the available cicerones. But before even we get to him a question is being posed of who is an authority in this cathedral or a reliable guide to its attractions.

In The Modern Weird Tale (2001), S. T. Joshi, the foremost scholar and critic of “weird” fiction, had pondered how to categorise Aickman. Joshi decided that, “His major literary influences (it might be better to say analogies) appear to be M.R. James and Walter de la Mare…” This should consign Aickman to the genre and tradition of “the English ghost story.” Joshi quickly admits, however, that there are “very few ghosts in Aickman, and in many cases perhaps not even anything supernatural.” Aickman’s case thereafter goes cold. “There is no question that Aickman belongs somewhere within the realm of weird fiction; but where exactly his place is in that realm is a singularly vexing question.”

When I was younger I was often impatient with Joshi. The starting point for his criticism seemed to be Professor Harold Bloom, an outstanding Yale scholar who had bet the whole house on William Shakespeare. For Bloom, Shakespeare “remains the most original writer we will ever know.” If Boom had begun with Shakespeare and worked his way down, comparing each new writer who he encountered with Shakespeare’s perceived exceptionalism, Joshi would transport this method to a separate and miniature world. This was the genre of “weird fiction” and within it his chosen equivalent of Shakespeare would be the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Whilst Bloom had the analytical and rhetorical power to give his worship of Shakespeare a cultural urgency, Joshi’s worship of Lovecraft often looked preposterous. Even within the walled-off enclave of “the weird,” Lovecraft was never “the most original writer we will ever know.” All of his histrionic writing and his hysteria about white fragility are already there in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.

These days I like Joshi a lot more. In common with Bloom, his criticism covers an inexhaustible range of writers and across a lifetime of literature you may soon fall into collecting his opinions on each one. His analyses, like Bloom’s, will open up a writer’s work and lay out its themes and problems in a freshly organised landscape. So I am acknowledging my debt to Joshi even as I note the inadequacy of his engagement with Aickman’s writing.

Two ghosts are visiting the cathedral in “The Cicerones.” Joshi is right that the first of these is M.R. James, a leading figure in the shaping of “the English ghost story” and of whose stories the many interpretations and adaptations today constitute a minor industrial process. The second is that of Franz Kafka.

Down in his annexed territory, where Lovecraft has been set up as a king, Joshi will not recognise Kafka’s influence. Kafka belongs up in the world of elite or internationally renowned literature and so naturally no visa has been issued for him to the local realm of “the weird.” By contrast, James, a writer who was praised by Lovecraft, is a valued citizen. Joshi’s commentary on Aickman indeed ducks “The Cicerones,” a story in which the Kafkaesque is openly flaunted.

 Let us take our first ghost first. A tourist from the UK is touring the continent and calling in on a cathedral to inspect the antiquities. This scenario is most famous from James’s earliest published ghost story “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (1895), which is based in and around the Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges Cathedral in southwest France. British visitors to mainland Europe feature as well in “Number 13” and “Count Magnus” (both 1904). Strangely, James’s fiction seems to have been at its most actively autobiographical when his characters were abroad. A prolific tourist, he would spend his summers installed on a Cheylesmore tricycle, trundling around the rural lanes of France.

In James’s ghost stories, the foreign cathedral may have provided such an opening for the supernatural because it was already a setting where the prim psyche of the British tourist was beginning to register some distress. This psyche was seldom capable of any familiarity with the ordinary Catholic people who worshipped in these cathedrals and who cared for them. The visitor to the cathedral was meant to be basking in the picturesque or absorbed in an intense one-on-one contemplation of each antiquity. Alas, the pristine social vacuum that was here the ideal was always as impossible as it was unreasonable.

An awareness of this discomfort is already present within “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook.” It proceeds to further development in W.F. Harvey’s beautiful satire “The Angel of Stone” (1910). Here, the “ghosts” that greet the Jamesian protagonist are little written pleas that local people from centuries past have dropped inside the titular statue. They may be unexpected and vulgar intruders but their voices also bring a wonderful shock – some much-needed humanity – to the tourist’s sterile world. 

Another push is given in “The Cicerones.” On this occasion, the holidaymaker has come to Saint Bavo’s Cathedral (Sint Baafskathedraal) in Ghent. Trant is getting ever more agitated about visiting when the cathedral is apparently about to close. A reader of James’s fiction may pronounce that Trant’s flusterment is weakening his psyche and providing a gap where the supernatural can get in. Yet during “The Cicerones” the hollow superiority that is usually the stamp of the British tourist has been also skilfully woven into the pattern of a continental narrative. Without knowing it, Trant has been rendered foreign to himself, within his own story.

In Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozess) (1925), the protagonist, Josef K., visits a cathedral too, this time in Prague, where he has agreed to serve as a cicerone to an Italian business client. As with Trant, K. visits in the morning, when the cathedral is almost deserted, he is equipped with a guidebook and he has a series of unsettling interactions with the employees of the cathedral. Both Trant and K. linger before paintings and both are dumbfounded when an eerie figure appears above them in a pulpit.

What we have of Trant’s story ends on the threshold of what is implied – sincerely or otherwise – will be a greatly more momentous encounter with the cathedral’s personnel. The priest in The Trial is himself a threshold but one where K. will be unexpectedly and even anticlimactically beamed out of the cathedral’s grandeur into a comfortless allegory. But for all we know, Trant could experience an equivalent comedown.

James’s and Kafka’s narratives are clearly cited as influences upon “The Cicerones.” But this is not to say that either of these sources can explain it for us. It may be more that each has been fitted in as a window of stained glass, through which we can look in on Trant’s story and see its events unfolding in a certain suggestive light.

Let us play a small game. Imagine that the young men who Trant encounters in the cathedral convey or symbolise these influences. If the first of these – slender and besuited and with his “vague foreign accent” (“foreign” to Belgium?) – is Kafka, then the word “holý” that he repeats would be the Czech for “bare” or “naked.” The second with his “transatlantic” (rather than American) voice? Maybe this is Henry James, another writer of ghost stories and a US expatriate. The third is presumably Belgian, which does nothing to help our analogy. The fourth boy, a knowledgeable English one, would be our M.R, James, himself an expert in ecclesiastical history.

Trant, for our temporary purposes an avatar of Aickman, thinks that he can get by without any help from these guides. But everywhere he turns they are already there. Soon he is hemmed in and surrounded. There is apparently no free or original path for him to creatively pick out. But why would these forebears be depicted as children? Is Aickman’s writing so self-confident that the influences upon it initially come across as youthful? Only after he has tried to get around without them does he concede to their adult power and their inescapability.

Let us drop this game. It feels a bit silly. To return to James and Kafka, perhaps their significance is that they together lay out a crossroads within the story. This corresponds with how a cathedral is depicted as a site of divergence in both “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” and The Trial.

In the former, the “unprincipled Canon Alberic” has “doubtless plundered the Chapter library of St. Bertrand” in order to cobble together his album of manuscript illustrations. The scrapbook here bears a creeping resemblance to “The Cicerones,” where James’s and Kafka’s imagery has been cut from their own stories and transplanted. Still, the cathedral that looms behind the scrapbook is equally an area where different narratives are forced to share a common space. The mercy and compassion of Jesus Christ are celebrated under the same roof as the thefts, demonic summoning, “stuffed crocodile” and treacherous bookselling of the cathedral’s guardians.

A similar divergence is playing within the cathedral in The Trial. Christ’s teachings may be why this cathedral is here but they are obliged to jostle with the clandestine “legal” apparatus that dogs K.. If this apparatus is really ecclesiastical at bottom, then the faith involved is one in which human guilt is indivisible and impenetrable. Of course, Kafka’s Judaism is free of the doctrine of Original Sin. K.’s guilt is instead commonly thought to demonstrate a prophetic sensitivity towards the extermination factories that Kafka, had he lived to old age, may have found as unavoidable as K. had his own final judgement.

The sharing of the Prague cathedral between radically unrelated philosophies accords with the overall character of Kafka’s narrative. This becomes a conflict zone for competing (and overlapping) realistic, supernatural and allegorical interpretations of the novel.

The trial is never a going concern as a realistically psychotic state, because K. falls rather short of the genius that would be needed to imagine such an enormous hallucination. The trial cannot be in itself “real,” however, since a bureaucracy of this magnitude would have to be in the cultural, political, and economic ascendancy in its host society, rather than being hidden in people’s attics. Still, there remains too much deep realism available in the story for it to be all written off as a surplus. Thus the trial can be never reduced to its own allegory, whether this is one of inescapable guilt or sin or anything else.

By coordinating so intractable a narrative crisis, Kafka was committed to reinventing non-sense as a massively ambitious engineering project. Whereas the supernaturalism within the Jamesian ghost story continues to adhere to a fathomable cause-and-effect, the Kafkaesque is sealed up tight against any possible interpretation. The reader is left as passive – even as humiliated – as K. is himself.

Some readers will be searching for a Jamesian ghost story in “The Cicerones” whilst others will wish to marvel at the Kafkaesque. It is forthcoming on both fronts, in supplying ghostly thrills as well as interpretative frustrations. Again, the cathedral is being shared.

One obvious interpretation of “The Cicerones” is that Trant is himself the cathedral ghost. Perhaps he has died at the same time that his watch had stopped, the 11.28 that tolls like a bell over the whole story. There is nothing to corroborate or discount this reading; it is simply placed on the menu as an option. It would explain the somewhat angelic buzz that the young men who approach Trant have to them. The joke is conceivably that, in Saint Bavo’s, the clichéd feelings of awe and solemnity that the visitor usually experiences in a cathedral have for once happened to accidentally coincide with the majesty of death.

At the same time, this feels like quite a pompous interpretation. Waving a wand of scrupulous empiricism over the story could make it mundane again. It could be simply a story about a tourist being hurried out of a cathedral before the lunch-and-siesta period. The international characters who approach Trant could be just the rather rootless and overenthusiastic young people who hang out in cathedrals. Their surrounding of Trant and their singing could be only an innocent playfulness.

This story’s motif of the boy-bishop indicates that it is haunted by some memory of the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival in which the normal cathedral hierarchy was turned upside-down and choirboys were put in charge for a day. If Trant is so disconcerted by the wise children who he meets, this should draw attention back to his own dethroned authority and the disgrace that comes to increasingly colour his personal perspective.

One may assume that “The Cicerones” describes Saint Bavo’s so thoroughly that tourists could use it as a guidebook. Perhaps it belongs alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1859) in that clever genre in which the reader is meant to accompany fictional characters as they disport themselves around real-life tourist attractions. But it soon becomes apparent that Trant’s own sensibility is going to sabotage any experience of Saint Bavo’s rather than enhance it.

Gaspar de Crayer’s “The Martyrdom of St. Barbara” is hardly the “extremely horrible scene” that appals Trant. Its imagery is quite conventional. Likewise, there are no “enigmatic monsters” in the Van Eycks’ heavenly “Adoration” altarpiece. A search for the altarpiece “Virgin Glorified” may lead you only back to the suggestive and somewhat tastefully obscured name of its painter, Liemakere (i.e. both “lie-maker” and the real-life Nicolas de Liemaker).

Trant’s account of the cathedral is not regularly wrong, it is just that it is often morbidly weighted. For example, the “heavy and impenetrable screen of black marble” that he sees may look to us more like an elegant structure where the black is evenly mixed with white pillars and panels. Down in the crypt, we could have finally descended into Trant’s subconscious. A child reigns down here – or it at least dispenses the expert knowledge – whereas Trant is starstruck by the gore and jewels. On the crypt’s threshold he had clung to the term “narthex” as a fragment of adulthood, although the child who he is attempting to correct is right to look “puzzled” by his usage of it (a narthex belongs in the entrance of a cathedral).

Trant is, in short, bug-eyed. His story will lead you to picture Saint Bavo’s as a gloomy mausoleum and a chamber-of-horrors. Yet when you try to retrace Trant’s steps through following online tours of the cathedral, the tone that he had taken is immediately contradicted by the waves of beauty and colour. During the day the cathedral is so flooded with light as to resemble an exterior.

It is Trant’s own gaze that brings the darkness. To him, the silence of the group praying in the chapel is suddenly creepy and the monkeying about of some youngsters is no longer innocent. When stripped of its spiritual and emotional meaning, the martyrdom that startles him in the different paintings is indeed only “gruesome.”

Remember that the scrapbook adventure of James’s Dennistoun had hinged upon both seeing and seeing with a knowledgeable and alert gaze. In the end, Dennistoun had groped his way back to Christian morality. K., on the other hand, has been sent to his cathedral essentially to advertise how post-religious his character is. A spiritually-contentless bureaucracy has replaced any religious dimension in his life.

Trant’s appreciation of Saint Bavo’s is no more than a bureaucracy, or a checking off of the items in his Blue Guide. He is so estranged from the faith upon which the cathedral was founded, and so lacking in any spiritual or aesthetic sensibility, that he is now little more than a wild animal that is running loose around the chapels. To want to tour such a beautiful cathedral in half an hour seems like an especially demented exercise.

The question of whether Trant is literally a ghost may whisper throughout his story but it actually remains unobtrusive. He is already so savage as to be kith and kin to the monsters that James had unleashed in his cathedrals:

‘Animals’ said the child. It was an early book of natural history written by a monk, and even the opened page showed some very strange ones.

Trant is not only devoid of spiritual or aesthetic feeling but of their more basic human underpinnings. He views the cicerones as suppliers of blank information and he shows no curiosity about their perplexing humanity, the stories behind the transatlantic or “foreign” accents. If Trant is trying to journey around this cathedral without any religious insight, he is also determined not to pay his way. He ignores the entry fees to the exhibits and neither does he think to tip the cicerones. Perhaps their surrounding him is a hint. Trant’s perspective is therefore the picturesque in extremis, an outlook of an almost shrill distance, privacy and uninvolvement in the middle of someone else’s society.   

The reader who is impatient for ghosts, or attracted to the mystery of the Kafkaesque, may overlook the real challenge of this story. This challenge lies in its depths of its ordinariness. It is actually to keep your feet on the ground and your mind open and clear. The challenge is in fact to dispense with James and Kafka – or to recognise that they were never suitable cicerones – and to next ditch the hapless protagonist who we have been lumbered with. Of course, the best way to see Saint Bavo’s with your own eyes will be to visit it yourself.

[Jeremy Dyson’s and Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of “The Cicerones” is here. Previously on Tychy: “Short Story Review: Man-Size In Marble.“]