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."
Thanks, Janie, for getting us started. I would also note that while this conversation will take place in the comment section attached to this post, Helen and Paul have some relevant comments under the post "One Small Thing."
ReplyDeleteI think one of the legacies of the influence of D&P on discussions of detective fiction is that we tend to think of "the state" as something that retains its power even as we recognize all the challenges to/subversions of it. Does Holmes represent "the state" because even as he criticizes and belittles individual policemen he upholds the spirit (if not the letter) of the law embodied by Scotland Yard? Or do we need to recognize Holmes's genuinely counter-culture tendencies (no family, drug-user, etc. etc.) as evidence that Doyle is at least trying to employ a different logic? Paul's comment that panopticism, our successful self-policing, seems to thrive in spaces where we can be observed is an interesting one in light of all the uses of disguise in the stories we read: Holmes, Irene Adler and Neville St. Clair all elude the gaze of close associates. Does a panoptic society drive people to disguise if they want to be free agents? And so then is disguise a sign of the panoptic mechanism or a resistance to it? Is detection as a methodology given a privileged position because it can see what others can't?
I must confess that it was at this moment in my graduate school career that I felt a bit helpless. When Miller was applying the idea of panopticism to literary representation, I remember despairing at these lines: "Yet to speak of sham struggles is also to imply the necessity for shamming them. The master-voice of monologism never simply soliloquizes. It continually needs to confirm its authority by qualifying, canceling, endorsing, subsuming all the other voices it lets speak" (25). If power wins whether it "cancels" or "endorses" then is resistance futile?
Certainly Goodlad provides one way out when she argues that it is wrong to talk about "the" state, when Victorian Britain's modernization is characterized by fragmented, uneven, uneasy advances in government authority. Does that seem right and, if so, does it seem less useful to think about the panoptic schema? Can we then see struggles as struggles and not shams?
I think one of the things that is making this discussion difficult for me is that it's hard to come to a good definition of a "crime" in this context. "Crime," as Sherlock Holmes's problem, is not defined as any violation of the state's laws. (I have to imagine most readers would balk at a Sherlock Holmes adventure called "The Case of the Jaywalker.") Several of the cases, as we discussed last week ("A Case of Identity," "The Man with the Twisted Lip") do not feature an "official" crime at all.
ReplyDeleteEven weirder, in "A Scandal in Bohemia," Sherlock Holmes tries to commit a crime himself (theft) when he agrees to steal Irene Adler's photograph on the request of the King of Bohemia. Holmes justifies it by verbally confirming with the King that this photo could lead to great distress among his royal bride's family, but this feels flimsy. If lives hung in the balance, that might be one thing, but Holmes is prepared to steal something solely to prevent the embarrassment of some nobles. It's funny because we could easily imagine another version of this story, one that begins with Irene Adler showing up to request Holmes's aid in recovering a sensitive photo that was stolen from her, and Holmes would probably accept that case too.
It appears that Holmes lacks any hard definition for what constitutes a "crime." Even murder, which seems like an obvious candidate for the label if there ever was one, can be softened and excused by the circumstances ("The Boscombe Valley Mystery"). Maybe Holmes's definition of crime is like Justice Stewart's definition for obscenity -- he just knows it when he sees it. So does this depict the "law" as being both insufficient, because some things that seem wrong (impersonating a lover to trick your step-daughter out of her money) are not crimes, and overreaching, since it refuses, unlike Holmes, to contextualize the act sufficiently (yes, he committed murder, but he's sick and he was being black-mailed!)
I don't know all of the answers to the questions above, and I'm interested to hear everyone's thoughts. Right now it does seem to me that the potential for discussion becomes somewhat limited if the presence of conservative elements in a story necessarily cancels out or subsumes any of the subversive elements.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHelen,
DeleteI think you bring up some fine points, and in thinking about your analysis of crime and Holmes's questionable relationship to it, I'm forced to think of Holmes as a character who is in such desperate for a mystery to solve that he is drawn to the "criminal," perhaps more accurately to the aberrant, just because it is a site of resistance and, therefore, a site of innumerable peculiarities for Holmes to work out. I think that Helen is quite right to point out that were the case of the King of Bohemia reversed Holmes would likely have been equally invested. All that being said, Holmes seems largely interested in the minutia of everyday life, and finding those little moments of oddity found within. I think there are many ways that this is a very readerly activity.
Indeed. Holmes is less concerned with crime per se than with problems, or, more specifically, puzzles. At the beginning of "The Blue Carbuncle," Watson remarks that "the last six cases which I have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal crime." This suggests that he sees crime as something that can exist independent of law. Rather, Holmes seeks out irregularities and aberrations, and it is merely incidental that many of these happen to be "illegal" crims. Holmes is mostly concerned with crime, law, and punishment in the abstract, and has little confidence in or loyalty to the state in this regard. In "The Speckled Band," Holmes is insulted when he finds himself associatedwith Scotland Yard: "Fancy his having the insolence to confound me with the official detective force!" Clearly, Holmes's sense of morality has a cultural source largely separate from considerations of the state.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI think one way to thing we might do, to get out of this frustrating and murky binary of "the state" and "the individual," and yet still engage with Foucault, is to consider panopticism not as as a kind of state or function of the state but merely as "a function" - one that can be used by any variety of institutions and individuals. Victorian England, as Goodlad argues, might not have existed as a state - but any number of people in it might have, persistently or temporarily, used panoptic practices for their own purposes. (For this reason, I don't quite agree with Goodlad's critique. The panopticon does not have to be hegemonic and centralized - it only has to be used, on any scale.) Considered this way, whether Holmes is a representative of the state or not, or a criminal or not, no longer matters - we can say with certainty that he is panoptic, and we can use Foucault's schematic to aid our analysis of him. It might really free up our discussion as of detective fiction to consider not its relation to the establishment of the detective as an official, historical figure, but its use of nascent methods of detection.
ReplyDeleteI don't have anything terribly insightful to add here, but I wanted to say thank you to Janie for this overview. If anyone who was in class last week feels up to it, I'm interested in hearing what you discussed about the family, particularly what makes up the family unit. Did the changing familial structures of the period come up at all?
ReplyDeleteIt didn't really, Alyssa, and such historicization would be welcome. I think -- and class, correct me if I'm wrong -- that we were thinking about the operations of power/discipline in public v. private spaces. But since all (practically all?) of our mysteries are in some ways family stories, this will come up again and again and it would be good to start hashing this out.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me that another layer we might consider when we think of manifestations of the state and of panopticism in Holmes is how the concept of Empire operates. A number of the stories center around past aberrations abroad (India, Australia, America), that right themselves--almost always extralegally--when the perpetrators return to England. Does this pattern indicate a failure of the state to manage what has become an unwieldy and widely scattered populace? Or does the resolution of these crimes without state intervention bolster the reader's sense of the effectiveness of panopticism as a function that operates independent of the state?
ReplyDelete