"Bones and I" or, The Skeleton at Home

'I live in a desert, but my desert is in the very heart of London'
"Bones and I" or, The Skeleton at Home (1869)

The narrator (the 'I') of "Bones and I" or, The Skeleton at Home lives in a small modern villa situated in a London cul de sac looking out upon 'the dead wall at the back of an hospital'. He is a skillful digressionist who holds an uneasy court with "Bones" (the not 'I' of the title) who resides in a cupboard. They argue, they vie for rhetorical supremacy, they listen to each others stories, sometimes they fall out or occasionally lapse into fireside meditation. Each chapter is the length of one of these conversations and there appears to be no organising principal or narrative trajectory behind their arrangement in the volume. 'Gourds', a self-consciously rambling meditation on the temporality of life lies next to, 'A Vampire', a forgotten example of the genre and one whose, Madame de St. Croix, predates Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' as the first female, serially sexual (though heterosexual), predatory vampire in the canon.


Through his use of "Bones" as a narrative strategy, Whyte-Melville imaginatively stumbles into the territory of psychoanalysis a decade and a half before its invention. But out of the triumviry of "I", "Bones" and Whyte-Melville it is hard to say who plays the psychoanalyst.

© Stuart Currie 1996