Sherlock Redux

He's baaaack.  But since we last read Doyle we have walked Ratcliffe Highway, travelled all over India, the Galapagos and Africa, the mean streets of Dickens's London, the far-from-peaceful English countryside, and Cloisterham (defies an adjective).  Is Holmes the same as we last found him?  How and how not?

Possibilities for Cloisterham

Last class we spent a lot of time discussing what the half of Drood we have suggests about the state of England.  The tone of the book is, like most late Dickens, caustic and dark, and also, notably, perhaps more editorial than ever before; but, upon investigation, the facts of this case don't provide  grounds for hope, either.  Unless Datchery is a professional detective, the guiding hand of a national government seems absent from Cloisterham; the Church, in the form of the ubiquitous church tower, is very present, but doesn't seem to offer much of a system of support (Jasper, after all, is one of its staff); there are few - or no - happy, functioning families; and the town's children are ragged and bestial.  The town itself, as a constellation of the animate and inanimate, Dickens writes again and again, has a soporific atmosphere; it's even, in some instances - one thinks of Durdles - difficult to tell the animate and inanimate apart.

Of course, we can't say whether Cloisterham would have been saved - whether a marriage between Rosebud and, maybe, Tartar would have brought new life to the town; whether justice would have been done to Jasper, or whoever was responsible for Edwin's disappearance; whether Edwin would have turned out to be alive.  The kind of pastorship that Lauren Goodlad writes about might have appeared, perhaps in the form of Tartar, or Crisparkle, or Datchery.  Or, private individuals, like the Cheerybyles in Nickleby, might have - preposterously but not impossibly, given Dickens's many manic authorial moments - made everything right in the end.

What strikes me about what does happen in the book, however, is that Cloisterham's stagnation seems to reach such a pitch that it's the stagnation itself that appears to provoke the novel's action.  It's his his boredom, his cramped and monotonous lifestyle, that drives Jasper to the opium addiction that - it seems - make it possible for him to - at least attempt to - murder.  And it's, again, boredom - the sense of inevitability and inertia - that leads Edwin and Rosebud to call their marriage off.  One act - the possible murder - is horrible, and other - the breaking of the engagement - might lead to new, and better, choices, but the stagnation itself drives both acts.  If Cloisterham is a microcosm of England, or of a part of England, I wonder if Dickens's suggestion is that, no matter what, something is going to happen to England - things are incapable of going on the way they have been.  Is, then - I wouldn't want to call it hope, exactly, but - possibility buried within the inertia of the novel?  And is the question for England, then, not are things going to change, but how are the English people going to handle changes that are coming?

Miss Clack and the Problem of Belief

I wanted to begin where our class ended yesterday: in considering how The Moonstone is a novel consumed by the problems how one grounds belief. The novel certainly suggests that there is a crisis of belief occurring for the characters, as well, perhaps for its author. The novel must summon “evidence” from the professional detective’s observations, the feelings and experience of the family, Mr. Blake’s international education, Mr. Bruff’s legal expertise, Rosanna Spearman’s unrequited love, Dr. Jennings and his experiments with opium, and the testimony of one, young, goggle-eyed witness to solve the crime of the missing moonstone, and they are still too late to prevent a murder, or the jewel’s continued disappearance. Apart, each mode of belief, whether grounded in “moral” or empirical evidence, is insufficient to meet the challenge of solving the mystery; together they are only barely passable as a complete document.

One character who seems certain of her position and the validity of her interpretations is, of course, Miss Clack. With her tracts and her ostentatious evangelical Christianity, Miss Clack is an obvious figure of satire, but, more than that, she represents the dangers of being someone who subscribes to a totalizing belief system, and refuses to consider other modes of knowledge. She focuses so completely on her mission as a Christian woman that she makes herself ridiculous (and obnoxious) to the reader. She also remains the sole writer who, she implies, will never fully believe in Rachel’s innocence. Because she refuses to question a belief system that declares Rachel to be a “bad woman” and Godfrey to be “Our Christian Hero,” Miss Clack is denied access to the novel’s final “truth” about the moonstone. She will remain certain of her own rightness (and righteousness) even as the evidence piles up around her. Adhering to only one, totalizing system of belief, creates blindness.

Miss Clack is not, however, the only character who puts too much faith in one form of belief - at first, Rachel completely trusts her eyes, which give her only a partial view of events, despite “knowing” her cousin’s character.  Rachel is willing, however, to revise her belief when new evidence comes to light that supports her own desires and previous knowledge of Franklin Blake’s character. We could call this logical - a simple weighing of proof - but it is important to note that Rachel’s revision and Miss Clack’s refusal to revise both support their inner judgments. Rachel’s love for Franklin may be seen as no more “truthful” than Miss Clack’s dislike of Rachel. They both, therefore, see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe.

The emphasis on the instability of all systems of belief brings me back to Holmes (as everything must, in this course). Holmes has a simple and totalizing method. He observes, he deduces, he is almost always correct. His efficacy is usually demonstrated at the beginning of each tale, like a magic trick. He reveals the method of the trick, and we are therefore sure of his conclusions. In changing from the communal detection of The Moonstone to the singular deductions of Sherlock Holmes, the detective novel becomes more convinced of its own grounding for belief. I’m interested in considering both what is lost by this change, and what is gained.

Professionals and Amateurs in The Moonstone

I wanted to pick up on something that came up very briefly in class: the question of how we read The Moonstone in terms of the development of the detective figure. In his 1-pager, Paul observes that “The novel’s narrative structure puts each of the characters in the position of feverish detective,” which he noted in class results in a lot of both amateur and professional detectives and detective work. While I’m not sure I agree that every character catches detective fever – Miss Clack, for instance, seems almost an accidental detective, happening upon information during her feverish pursuit of her charitable and religious work – I am very intrigued by the division of labor between amateurs and professionals in the novel.

From Holmes, the model of the professional detective we get is of a detached investigator, able to discern vast amounts of information about people and their behavior with no prior knowledge of them or their actions. He is not emotionally invested in the outcome of his case; rather, he is driven by a fascination (or obsession) with solving the problem. Looking at the earlier appearances of detective’s we’ve been discussing, we saw this detachment at work in Dickens’s detective journalism, but not in Lady Audley’s Secret: Robert Audley is personally and emotionally invested in his investigation in a multitude of ways (his relationship with George, his concern for his uncle, his desire not to disappoint Clara, and his own attraction to Lady Audley), and he is not satisfied by having solved the problem. These seem to present two opposing models of the detective: one, professional and detached, the other amateur and emotionally-invested. What I find interesting about The Moonstone is that both seem to be necessary to the resolution of this mystery.

Sgt. Cuff is a perfect model of the professional detective: he is efficient, intelligent in his dealings with others (he gets the servants on his side when the local Superintendent has alienated them), and he is able to decode the significance of apparently trivial details that prove to be crucial to the case. Cuff (apparently based on Inspector Field) is also our first pre-Holmesian example of a celebrity detective: his investigative prowess is well enough known that Franklin Blake, who has been living abroad for years, knows that “when it comes to unraveling a mystery, there isn’t the equal in England of Sergeant Cuff!” (106, Penguin edition). While he initially fails to solve the mystery, I think it’s important that we remember that the only reason he is wrong is because he wrong interprets Rachel’s character – his interpretation of all of the clues, and of Rosanna Spearman’s behavior, are accurate – and Rachel is, as we are constantly reminded, an unusual woman. Once he knows the true cause of her behavior, he is able to solve the mystery almost immediately. In this case, the amateur detectives can make progress where the professional does not because they have the necessary prior knowledge – they know Rachel Verinder. It would seem that the claim this story makes is that the Great Detective figure alone cannot solve the crime – that the spread of “detective fever” is necessary to solve the crime as well as to assemble the narrative. I’m wondering, though, if that conclusion isn’t being a little hard on Sgt. Cuff, given how much time the various narratives spend telling us how exceptional Rachel is. It is her unusual character that trips up the professional detective – perhaps the necessity for amateur assistance is not a rule, but is in itself an exceptional circumstance.

Lawrence Stone on Desertion and Bigamy

Hi everyone,

Further to our discussion about laws surrounding desertion and bigamy in the 19th century, I thought I'd share a few quotations from Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800.

First, on laws regarding spousal desertion:

"A man or woman whose spouse had left home and had not been heard of for a period of seven years was also free to remarry, on the assumption that the missing spouse was dead. If he or she returned, however, either the first marriage took priority over the second or the woman was permitted to choose which husband she preferred." (37-38; given Stone's notoriously iffy use of evidence, I feel I should add that his source here is R. H. Helmholz's Marriage Litigation in Medieval England)

Second, regarding the practice of bigamy:

"In the eighteenth century, more or less permanent desertion was also regarded as morally dissolving the marriage. Thus when in the 1790s the husband of Francis Place's sister was transported for life for a robbery, she soon remarried an old suitor, apparently without any qualms or objections on the grounds that she already had a husband who was presumably still alive. In 1807 a Somerset rector agreed to put up the banns for a second marriage of a woman whose husband had gone off as a soldier to the East Indies seven years before and had not been heard of since. But the man unexpectedly turned up and reclaimed his wife, only to desert her again when he found her consorting with her second husband. He was said soon after to have remarried, despite the existence of this first wife." (40; Stone cites memoirs by Francis Place and the aforementioned Somerset rector)

As far as the first quotation goes, I think it may allow us to assume that the 7-years-absent=legally dead rule has been pretty longstanding, and was probably in effect when Lady Audley's Secret is set. I don't know how widely-known this rule would have been, though, so while legally she may have jumped the gun, we probably can't conclude that she knowingly did so. The second quotation I thought was interesting in light of what Prof. Reitz was saying about transportation to the colonies being tantamount to early death.

Stone also observes that the 19th century probably saw the longest marriages on average throughout human history, because improved medical treatment and sanitary conditions lengthened the average lifespan but divorce remained nearly impossible to obtain. I realize that this is a serious stretch, but I'm wondering if we can read that as influencing the development of detective fiction, or at least as playing into anxieties about families that we see playing out in detective fiction: if we accept Stone's conclusion here, people in unhappy marriages were trapped for much longer than they would have been historically - can we read the frequent spousal murders in early detective novels responding to the increased longevity of a potentially disastrous bond?

Update: also, if anyone is interested, the woman doing work on the bigamy plot in the Victorian novel is Maia McAleavey - she has a few articles already out on the subject, I think, although not one about Lady Audley.

The Chain of Evidence

First off, I want to return to a point that Alyssa raised in her one-pager, a point I don't think we discussed enough in class on Friday. Alyssa notes that, "From a narrative perspective, Lady Audley’s Secret is difficult to read as a detective story because the reader and the detective are never seriously in doubt as to who committed the crime. Rather than solving a puzzle, Robert seems to putting together what amounts to a case for the prosecution, although one that he never plans to carry out." 

Indeed, Braddon never puts any other real suspects on the stage. Unlike Holmes, who starts from a crime committed by an individuated body and untangles a thread of clues that ultimately leads to his identification of the criminal, Robert Audley starts with both end-points already known: the crime (George's disappearance) and the criminal/embodied person (Lady Audley). His detective work focuses on discovering the connection between them, going backward and forward at once, rather than following the bread-crumbs wherever they may lead.

As Alyssa notes earlier in her paper, an Armstrong-ian reading might interpret Robert's quantitative, methodological investigation as working to "tame" the sensational elements of the novel. But how does this influence our assessment of detective work, if Robert can be certain of Lady Audley's guilt long before his "chain of evidence" is complete? He senses her culpability in so many intangible ways: her smile in a painting, a tiny, momentary flicker of expression across her face. And the text leaves so little room for any other criminal--we're never in any real doubt that Lady Audley is behind whatever happened to George. So does this deemphasize the importance of Robert's cold, calculating, logical detective work (as Lady Audley describes it?) These clues don't assist with the identification of the "individuated body" that committed the crime--they just validate what Robert Audley already knows. 

Another bizarre thing about this story is that the moment of the criminal's confession is not the same moment in which the "method" of the crime is revealed. In the climactic scene in which Lady Audley finally admits to the murder of George Talboys (page 294 in the Oxford edition), she identifies herself as a madwoman to Robert and then says, "When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say the truth." But it's not until Robert Audley has taken Lady Audley to the madhouse in Villebrumeuse (and another forty pages have passed) that the now-Mme. Taylor reveals the specifics of what she did to George, admitting that she pushed him into the well (335). In most detective stories, the criminal cannot just admit to the crime--his or her confession must include a specific, detailed account of how everything transpired, less, presumably, for the sake of the detective (who has already deduced it all independently), than for the benefit of the reader, who is still waiting to learn what has happened. Except here, Robert Audley doesn't know that Talboys was shoved into the well until Lady Audley tells him, and she tells him quite at her leisure, days after admitting to the murder vaguely. Is this another way this narrative de-emphasizes the quantitative aspects of Robert's investigation?

Some Random Things

First, I wanted to share some photos of Eastern State - as discussed in class, I definitely recommend a visit. (www.easternstate.org)  The facility was used as a prison until the 1970's when it was abandoned. It was the first "penitentiary" in the United States, in the sense that it was ostensibly geared to rehabilitation.  Prisoners were isolated, and true to the Quaker roots of the place, left with a bible to contemplate their choices.  Even when they were taken for exercise, isolation was maintained, with individual yards instead of a common one.  For those who lacked yards, sacks were placed over their heads to keep them from interacting with others.  This "humane" system didn't work so well - prisoners started to go crazy and eventually the approach was discontinued.  The prison housed famous inmates, including (briefly) Al Capone, and today you can visit his cell.  There are several other common spaces that can be visited including he chapel, synagogue and baseball diamond.  By the 1970's, the number of prisoners was down to a handful and Eastern State ceased operations.  At that point it languished for several years, deserted and slowly reclaimed by nature.  It was going to be demolished in the 1980s and become the sight of luxury apartments but the plan fell through.  Instead, restoration began in the late 80s and by the early 90s portions were open for tours.  Today restoration continues, funded in no small part by the massive "Terror Behind the Walls" haunted house that operates for over a month every fall (and at which my good friend Jenny has played a Zombie for about a decade now).  The prison itself, of course, is far scarier than anyone jumping out from behind a corner with fake blood running down their face.  The experience of visiting is unlike anything I have done - the tours are largely self-guided.  The structure of the prison is like an insect- there is a center with several legs shooting out around it.  You can wander the halls and see the empty cells, most with trees that have grown into the architecture, and small human details that stay in the mind.  Shoes thrown over a rafter, names scrawled on walls, a broom deserted in the corner of a hall, furniture long unused. 

Second, although I am only a little over halfway through Lady Audley, it has me thinking about motive.  Not of the criminal, but of the detective.  Robert Audley spends a lot of time agonizing over what he is doing.  At times he nearly convinces himself that he would be better off letting the mystery go, but he can't.  It seems to me that Robert has many motives - love, of course, but also something closer to compulsion.  He just can't *not* know what happened.  When I think about contemporary detectives - in novels but also television and movies - their motives are as important as the criminals.  And they are often a strange mix of something anecdotal from their lives and something deeper and less conscious - a drive that doesn't have a reason. 

Charles Darwin, Detective?

In Friday’s class we got in to a good debate about whether or not we can read Charles Darwin as a detective.  Lawrence Frank’s writing explores not only how authors like Dickens and Conan Doyle took up Darwin’s scientific ideas and incorporated them in to their detective fiction but also looks at how Darwin engaged with literary scholarship, taking up ideas from philology and linguistic history.  Like a mystery writer, Darwin splits his narration – Alyssa put this well, noting that sometimes Darwin is Watson, sometimes he is Holmes. We took up the important question of how we can (and can’t) read Darwin as literature. 

One way that this question interested me was in thinking about narrative time versus evolutionary time, their many oppositions and also potential affinities.  Darwin is reconstructing a history from an incomplete record, and he uses this to create drama in the telling of his story.  Someone made the very good point that evolutionary time doesn’t happen evenly – there are moments when it moves faster and slower.  That is why it is so difficult to find missing links – the big dramatic changes sometimes happen in fast time.  The work of the scientist in reconstructing this epic history is similarly and unevenly fast and slow.  The gathering of information is painstaking, and in the case of Darwin’s theories, they emerged over time rather than in a heart-stopping moment of intellectual breakthrough.  At other moments, though, a piece of information emerges that galvanizes the work and jolts what he is doing.  This got me thinking again about the way time moves in a narrative, particularly a mystery.  When we discussed the qualities of a good detective, something that Prof. Reitz stressed was the ability of the detective to be a patient listener.  Information gathering in both these forms – as a dedicated scientist and an investigator - requires slow time.  We don’t sit for hours in the couch with Inspector Wield – he reconstructs the story so that we know this has happened, but the dramatic events are given to us in real time.  These two things – the speed of actual events and the re-construction and re-telling of them – have parts that are both fast and slow.  How do the two re-arrange and inform each other?      

Another important question that came out of Friday’s discussion returned us to Nancy Armstrong.  If Armstrong argues that elements like the gothic lurk on the edges of realist fiction, what lurks on the edges of Darwin’s writing?  What is the “the spooky stuff”?  And what ideas have to be excluded from Darwin’s story to anchor it?            

On Murder As One Of The Horticultural Arts.

I just wanted to share a strange thing I encountered this past weekend that made me think of our class.  On Saturday I attended the massive annual "flower show" in Philadelphia.  This year the show focused on the gardens of Britain, and everything at the convention center had an English theme.  Mixed in with massive displays depicting scenes from Beatrice Potter and tea settings made out of flower petals was a series of large pieces florally representing the crimes of Jack the Ripper.  I thought, of course, about DeQuincey and our ongoing discussion of the aesthetics of crime.  I'm posting a link below from Organic Gardening's Pintrest Page.  If you look, the first couple rows show photos of the various scenes intended to "evoke the mood of London during the time of Jack the Ripper." 

http://pinterest.com/ogmag/philadelphia-flower-show/

The Charismatic Detective and the Decline of the Individual

Goodlad cautions against reading Bleak House as an unequivocal endorsement of institutionalized paternalism, stating that the novel “testifies to the diminished power of modern individuals, without clearly seeking… collective alternatives to the individual’s limited capabilities” (526).  Our consensus in class—if we arrived at one at all—seemed to be that the sentiments Goodlad attributes to the Dickens of Bleak House are not applicable to his detective journalism, wherein he expresses frank admiration for the institutional paternalism of the police force. These works appear to be kinda (if not completely) hegemonic, and not particularly subversive. But I wonder whether we might reconsider our reading of “The Metropolitan Protectives” through the lens of Goodlad’s analysis.

Clearly this piece exemplifies what she calls “Dickens’s growing skepticism to the myth of English self-reliance” in its mocking treatment of a populace that worries of police corruption, “the overthrow of the British Constitution” and “gangs of burglars” (97), yet enlists the police force in the recovery of its misplaced dogs and pats of butter. However I wonder whether Dickens’s convictions as to the decline of the English individual necessarily imply an endorsement of the police as a mechanism of the positive state. Is there not also some mockery in the wordplay of his title? If we view London through the metaphor of the household, the police force here occupies the role of governess to the teeming hordes of incompetent children that are the city’s residents. Read in concert with the self-satisfied self-reporting of “A Detective Police Party” and “Three Detectives’ Anecdotes,” this mundane and trivial “protective” work casts the police force in a less than heroic, if not necessarily wholly unflattering light. There is not, as in the other pieces, a single charismatic detective figure here—perhaps because citizenry so incompetent doesn’t demand one.

It must of course be observed that this piece is co-authored and cannot, as such, be read as a clear step in the evolution of Dickens’s thought on the issue of state-sanctioned paternalism. We might nonetheless use it to test our understanding of the detective figure. Does a satisfying detective novel depend on the complement of worthy adversaries in the form of self-reliant and self-interested citizens? Do we admire Holmes more when his faculties are challenged by Irene Adler or Moriarty? Or is the genre itself indicative of a desire for order in a decayed and incompetent society? 

A Tipping Point

In our discussion on Friday, it struck me again and again how strongly transitional Confessions is. The moral rigidity of the late Victorians is only intermittently apparent, and the general tone is more reminiscent of an eighteenth-century picaresque than a “standard” Victorian novel. The British presence in India, unmistakable in later novels like Kim, is glimpsed only rarely. Taylor's agenda is also highly ambiguous, resting somewhere between an orientalist critique of the East India Company and a wholesale justification for an expansion of British rule on the subcontinent.

It could be that my tendency to read early eighteenth-century and late nineteenth-century novels leads me to imagine Confessions as straddling a great divide. However, it strikes me that Taylor's struggle with these interlocking ambiguities echoes a shift in England's national character in the same period. This transitional moment is captured in the image of a young Queen Victoria reading galley proofs of Confessions late into the night. Victorians were stepping fully into their role as colonizers and imperialists, but the rhetorical frameworks that allowed them to unselfconsciously assume the mantle of empire had not yet fully developed. In the years to come, the ambiguities present in Taylor's fictionalized account would harden into the jingoism of Kipling. However, in 1839 this transformation was still underway.

How do you read the ambiguity in Confessions? ILaura brought up the peculiar melding of formalism and historicism remarked on by Poovey. To what extent does the Thug Archive shed light on Confessions? How does the novel reflect other Victorian anxieties, such as the rise of a commercial middle class and the emergence of professional criminals? What does the novel suggest about Victorian punishments such as transportation and imprisonment? Does the novel reflect concerns about British power at home? And lastly, is the novel a veiled criticism of the British presence in India or a ready justification for expansion?

Moretti: Missing the Forest for the Trees?

First of all, please excuse the horrendous pun in the title - it seemed inescapable, somehow. Second, I've been thinking a bit about Moretti's "Trees" in light of our conversation on Friday. My thoughts don't fit with the questions Prof. Reitz has raised, so I thought I'd throw them out in a separate post and see if anyone wanted to chime in.

Specifically, I've been thinking about the shortcomings of the trees Moretti tries to develop to track the evolution of genres/narrative techniques. During my first reading of "Trees," I found the image of "cultural selection" in the development of detective stories intriguing (72-73). I was especially interested in Moretti's assertion that this kind of representation was a way of allowing non-canonical writers to be present with the canonical: "instead of reiterating the verdict of the market, abandoning extinct literature to the oblivion decreed by its initial readers, these trees take the lost 99 per cent of the archive and reintegrate it into the fabric of literary history, allowing us to finally 'see' it" (77). Viewed in this light, there is a potentially subversive (or at least democratic) aspect of building literary "trees." However, the second (admittedly preliminary) tree Moretti constructs works entirely against it. He chooses to represent an extremely limited number of authors in the history of free indirect discourse, with limited rationale offered: where is George Eliot? Why is Joyce's branch longer than Woolf's? And why doesn't this tree allow for the representation of influence (i.e. Austen/Eliot -> Woolf, Flaubert -> Joyce)? The tree tracing the development of free indirect discourse creates a very limited canon, and gives no sense of how the genre actually develops from author to author - it categorizes rather than exposing relationships.

Since our class, I've been thinking about my initial responses in relation to Prof. Reitz's observation that Moretti, and indeed all of these critics, approach detective fiction with the assumption that the Holmes stories are the initial and also the archetypical detective stories, as if detective fiction as Holmes emerges Athena-like directly from the brain of Conan Doyle. Moretti does not substantively trouble this assumption even when his own tree shows that, far from offering perfect examples of "detective stories," The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes show a genre very much in flux. It strikes me that, while Moretti's trees seem effective at representing literature synchronically, they are not actually very effective at representing genealogically, especially when, as in the case of detective fiction, there is no clear starting point. When a genre or style is developing, or when a genre develops that has drawn on a wide variety of prior genres, lineages traced from a specific starting point are impossible.

A Crisis in the Subjectivity of the Aesthete?

It is one of the orthodoxies of the detective story that “the following homology must be observed: ‘author : reader = criminal : detective’” (Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction” 49).  One of our objections to the Moretti of “Clues” (and what you did not object to might also be a good topic to consider on the blog: what does he get right?) is that he seems to delineate all the possible subject positions so neatly and finally.  The detective individualizes (identifies/isolates) the criminal, returns us to the beginning, where everyone is the same as he/she began (detective, characters, readers; alas, not the victim, but Moretti does not pay him/her much attention, with sections only on “the criminal,” “the detective,” and “Watson”).  We have learned nothing and have no interest in re-reading, only in reading new versions of the old formula that observe all the same positions in relation to one another.  There is no social commentary (“detective fiction exists expressly to dispel the doubt that guilt might be impersonal, and therefore collective and social” 135), only a sense that the detective is the figure that keeps us from having to think about it (153). 

This seems a long way from the almost dizzying array of perspectives offered by De Quincey’s three iterations of “On Murder.” As we touched upon in class, the 1827 essay is framed by a faux letter to the editor which both enlists readers as a force for public morality (more effective than “an appeal to Bow-street”) and implicates readers in the violence about which they are to read: “the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply imbrued in blood than his who sits and looks on; neither can he be clear of blood who has countenanced its shedding; nor that man seem other than a participator in murder who gives his applause to the murderer” (9). The essay that follows, however, is fairly stable in its perspective: it is a lecture by a connoisseur of murder to other connoisseurs, some of whom, it is implied, have dabbled in the arts themselves.  Criminals and the author are thus linked, victims are individualized here (the German baker, famous philosophers) and the detective is nowhere.  While the 1839 paper has important differences (I would argue more reader-friendly, and more interested in offering up a spectrum of violence that is only barely under control as the party gets more raucous), the positions seem similar to those of the 1827 essay.  By 1854, however, it has become less clear.  The perspective of the postscript begins in a defensive position (“under the Telamonian shield of the Dean”95), more akin to the Editor's indemnifying note of 1827, the speaker (seems almost silly to call him anything other than De Quincey at this point -- are there vestiges of some sort of fictional persona?) seems to both see Williams as a garden variety English sailor (though they are always potentially criminal) and as a freakishly individualized villain (100).  The readers are invited to move with De Q through his narration, sometimes imagining the movements of the murderer, sometimes with a character in proximity (servant, lodger), sometimes with someone on the street (though never in the murderer’s head -- feel free to prove me wrong).  While there is still occasional fun and irreverance, there is no guilt contaminating our spectating, but rather a sense of shared outrage at this “useless butchery” (116).  Do the demands of detective work and/or narration of a mystery drive out the work of connoisseurship or is investigation just aesthetic appreciation by another name? How might you answer this for De Quincey?  For Holmes?

 

Punt?

Ah, Tuesday.  One-pager Eve.  It is most likely that we'll postpone a vigorous discussion on the blog this week and rededicate ourselves next week when we have an official post-er.   But if your checking in here with the blog suggests a deep desire to talk about detective fiction, rather than a dutiful compliance with the rules of the seminar, I will throw out one of the more provocative ideas we touched upon briefly in class.  Nancy Armstrong groups detective fiction with those fringe genres that had the potential to produce a different kind of individual/subject than the one produced by a kind of canonical, realist novel.  This both seems to work with D. A. Miller's argument that the Novel aids and abets the production of a disciplined individual and against it: different genres produce different, and arguably less disciplined subjects.  Do you find this argument compelling?  What literary critical paths might it lead us down?  What assumptions about genre is it making?

The state, the family, the individual - the "problem"

To recap slightly for those who weren't able to attend class last week, our discussion again vacillated between what, exactly, is 'kinda subversive' and what is 'kinda hegemonic.'  A particular thread that we followed is the relation of the family unit to the state - or rather the "family" to the "state," since we left class questioning our use of terms. I think it would be helpful to do a bit of crowd-sourced definition, and perhaps in the process explore further our reactions to the readings, particularly the Foucault and Goodlad.

Can we safely use the term "the state" as a stand-in for a growing bureaucratic (English, Victorian) police-state, or are our notions of government modern reflections cast upon the past?

Is the family unit subservient to the state, or is it a refuge from the state? Is the family unit generally the patriarchal nuclear family, or something more fluid? Does the patriarchy extend to the state, or is it condoned by the state?

On a slightly different track, Professor Reitz pointed out that the idea of the "problem of the individual" is something that both criticism and literature struggle with, from the realist novel to Darwin to Foucault.  As such, does the individual matter more than the family, when we talk about things like bureaucracy and state-control?  Or is it only so many nesting dolls?

I didn't intend to have so many explicit questions, but I think our classroom discussion hit upon so many different points that a definition of terms might not only help is clarify our ideas, but provoke new discussion with those who weren't there.

I'll leave you with this paraphrased quote from class: "Detective fiction is both conservative in that it reassures the reader of order and control, but also subversive in that it doesn't rely on the state for justice, order, or its conclusion."

One small thing

Reading "The Copper Beeches" this morning, there was a moment that resonated with the last part of our discussion yesterday, about patriarchy/the family as a capillary of discipline. Watson and Holmes are looking out over the picturesque houses in the countryside, and Watson comments on their beauty. Holmes says, "I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there." He goes on to mention "the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow." For me, these moments are "kinda subversive" -- Holmes certainly isn't raging against the patriarchy, but it made me think about the presence of some discomfort and skepticism, on Holmes's part, as concerns the family unit. He then postulates that the crowded city, not the law, is a better deterrent against such private "crimes."

Sherlock Holmes and "theories to suit facts"

For this blog post, I thought I'd take a moment to respond to the previous class discussion by looking at the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia," and seeing if it answers (or complicates) any of the questions that were brought up in class.  It seems to me that the ideas of the reader's expectation, and also what might be called the reader's participation, were something many people were concerned with when we were trying to unpack out notions of genre, and the detective genre in particular.  I'd like to know whether, after reading the first Sherlock Holmes story (or stories), anyone has any new or changed ideas about what it means to be a reader of detective fiction. 

I found it interesting that in this story there was already the assumption of a Holmes readership - not only with the general feeling of the story starting without preamble or explicit introduction to the two main characters, but in the outright naming of a previous story, the Study in Scarlet.  Holmes references Watson as his "Boswell," which, according to wikipedia (sorry!) was an 18th century Scottish biographer whose name "passed into the English language as a term for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print."  Given our discussion about Watson as a possible stand-in for the reader, what do you think these mentions of Watson as author say about our notion that he is in some way 'safe' or 'reliable'? Watson is specifically characterized as a biographer-companion, someone who is both present at the moment of action but also relied upon to record, and thus reflect, upon that action.  The character as biographer notes that this case is different from "the two crimes which [he] has elsewhere recorded;" ie. the two previous novels.  Can Watson be both the writer and the reader? 

Welcome!

Between our many classes (as students and as teachers), our Fridays will probably seem like distant shores.  In order to keep the conversation going all the week round, check in frequently to see what your colleagues are saying.