Skeptical

Last month, I very briefly talked about "skeptic's conversion narratives"--tales in which the protagonist finds him- or herself converted from a skeptic, of whatever variety, to a true believer in the supernatural.  This evening, I stumbled across an interesting example of what could be called a skeptic's deconversion narrative: H. G. Wells' "The Presence by the Fire" (1918).*  It's not one of Wells' more brilliant efforts, by any means, but it's clearly a riposte to the conversion narratives.  The tale involves all the usual trappings of your standard-issue haunting: Mary, the wife, dies; Reid, the husband, spends his days yearning for Mary; Mary's ghost appears.  But what, Wells asks, actually prompts Mary's "appearance"?

Reid begins the narrative as someone who refuses to believe--specifically, unwilling to believe in the possibility that Mary might die, even when the doctor finally "told him the fact  in stark, plain words [...]" (43).  Despite Mary's obvious decline, Reid resists the evidence of her impending demise until the death itself.  After Mary's death, the story unfolds in a series of conversions.  First, Reid, "who had been a matter-of-fact materialist, was converted, I found, to a belief in immortality by the pitiless logic of her uncompleted life" (44).  It's not clear if this is religious belief or not, but clearly the atheist no longer finds his unbelief comforting in a time of trial.  And yet, "it was an imperfect, doubting belief even at the best," driving Reid to spiritualism (44).  Wells thus undoes the first conversion, which had an air of orthodoxy, and instead pushes his protagonist to the purportedly scientific investigations ("inquiries" [44]) of the spiritualists.  Having resisted evidence in the first instance, Reid now seeks it in the second; apparently, he has been converted to something resembling a scientific method (albeit in the dubious context of spiritualist investigations). 

When Reid finally sees Mary's ghost, the event both "proves" spiritualism correct and converts the narrator:

He allowed me to cross-examine him in the most detailed way upon this story.  His manner was so sane, so convincing, and his honesty so indisputable, that I went to bed that night with my beliefs and disbeliefs greatly shaken.  Hitherto I had doubted every ghost story I had heard; but here at last was one of a different quality.  Indeed, I went to bed that night an unwilling convert to the belief in phantasms of those who are dead, and all that that belief implies.  (47)

Eyewitness testimony, delivered by someone of entirely sound mind, clearly supplies enough evidence to convince the narrator to up-end his own beliefs.  The narrator's "unwilling" conversion renders Reid's testimony all the more impressive, for it implies that Reid's proofs are so overwhelming, so obviously true, that the narrator has no alternative but to believe in what he once dismissed as "ghost stor[ies]."  This may lead the reader to reflect that our author is hinting that this is not merely a "ghost story," but something real--a conventional, and not necessarily interesting, literary strategy.  Indeed, our narrator assures us that "it was presently to be proved beyond all question that the thing he saw was an exterior presence" (47), which apparently invites us to be impressed by both Reid's and the narrator's scientific impulses.  Here, beyond a doubt, is an authentic ghost!

Or not.  Having converted our two narrators from their skepticism, Wells promptly deconverts them.  Mary is a trick of the eye: "Few people realize how little we actually see of what is before our eyes; a patch of light, a patch of shadow, and all the rest our memory and our imagination supply" (48).  The "ghost" is exterior, in that she emerges from a "chance grouping of dim forms" (48), but Reid himself constructs Mary's appparition out of his own yearnings.  Finally and ironically, the story truly becomes Gothic, for Reid's reaction is one of "grotesque horror and dismay" (48).  The terror emerges from Reid's brutal awakening to the reality of loss, not from any supernatural visitation.  And Reid testifies to this awakening as well in a "clear, hard voice, without a touch of emotion, recording a remarkable fact" (48); having born witness to what he believed was proof of the supernatural, Reid now feels equally obligated to bear witness to the proof of his own self-deception.  Instead of a story about ghosts, Wells has handed us a story about the potential agonies of accurate observation.  The "presence" of the title is, after all, an absence, and all the more horrible for being so: "'She will come no more,' he said at last.  'She will come no more'" (48).

*--H. G. Wells, "The Presence by the Fire," in Peter Haining, ed., The Mammoth Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 41-48.