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?
It seems to me that one of the most difficult things for a detective novel to balance is precisely the speed of actual events and the speed of the detective's reconstruction and re-telling of them. What we follow, in most detective novels, is the detective's - usually careful, deliberate, and slow - reconstruction of events: we follow Holmes as he goes from clue to clue, Bucket as he descends into the London underworld, Robert Audley as he shuttles back and forth across England. Most of the tension that we, as readers, feel as we read a detective novel, comes from the detective's painstaking reconstruction: we wonder, is he or she onto something? is this a clue? is this significant? is someone on to the detective? His or her time becomes our time.
ReplyDeleteOr it almost does. As we've mentioned we usually need a Watson to mediate the detective's experience, and there's frequently at least a small portion of the story where Holmes knows something Watson does not - or, something else frequently happens: if we are indeed in the detective's head for most of the narrative, as we are in Robert Audley's in Lady Audley's Secrete, there often comes a point when we suddenly lose sight of what the detective is thinking. I've noticed this in Georges Simenon's Maigret's novels as well - for a few pages or chapters, the detective acts as mysteriously as any criminal; we're no longer sure what he knows or what he's put together. Then we find out at the end of the novel, along with everyone else.
I wonder to what extent this is a - almost practical, technical - attempt of the author to deal with the difficult balance between the different time schemes a detective story frequently deals with. If we knew EVERYTHING the detective had figured out as he or she pursued the case, would we, as readers, begin to feel a lack of suspense before the end of tale? It seems that we as readers have to leave the detective's head at least for a bit - or be with Watson all along - for the story to come together in a tense, surprising, satisfying way.
Or, the author performs something like a complete split. I haven't read Conan Doyle's Holmes novels in a long time, but I remember this (because I was frustrated by it): Holmes would solve the case in a few chapters, and then the criminal's long confession would take up the rest of the book, a half to two-thirds of it. I remember that because it frustrated me so much. I was no longer interested in the story when Holmes dropped out, when everything had been solved, even if I didn't know everything Holmes did yet. But this kind of split seems to demonstrate to me, again, how difficult it is for any author to balance the multiple time frames a detective story necessitates.
Interesting discussion. This comment is responding to the Darwin/Watson point (Alyssa/Laura), which is also Michael's ("we usually need a Watson to mediate the detective's experience"), as well as Lindsay's (her "tree of sidekicks" comment from way back). I'm wondering if we would be noticing at all any embryonic stirrings of a Watson if it weren't for Watson. (And when we say "Watson" do we really mean "narrator" or does a sidekick help shape the action in important ways?) What do we miss about Darwin's narrative if we see the work of narration as somehow separate from the work of the scientist? This, to me, is one of the revelations of the BEAGLE, so similar to ORIGIN. The first is really only narration -- he's just a guy on a boat writing up what he is seeing. The second is painstaking argumentation and careful explanation of science -- and yet a very similar narrative. Does he merge these two acts (the act of discovering and the act of narrating) so that there is no room for doubt? I think one of the things that Watson does in the Holmes stories is to provide a space for the reader to have a range of different responses to Holmes. Sometimes this is a space of admiration, of affection, of doubt, of judgment. (The space created around detective figures by various narrators is an important issue in THE MOONSTONE.) By not having a Watson, by owning all the action (narrative and scientific), Darwin is insisting that we take his word for it.
ReplyDeleteI think this notion of splitting time and /or narrative is interesting when we go back to the original question of detective fiction as genre fiction - are these elements that shape the genre through readerly expectations - that is, when we expect detective fiction, do we expect a certain type of narrative time? Suspense can be built through delay, but suspense is not necessarily subject to linear time. Michael brings up the idea that the criminal's confession is boring or extraneous after the puzzle has been solved by the detective, but in so much of what we've read so far - Confessions of a Thug, the De Quincy, Darwin - I would argue that the suspense is not so much from solving the puzzle as organizing it in the most pleasing / interesting / exciting way. (I.e. its the journey, not the destination). So with Darwin, the Beagle narrative is compelling in its (literal, linear) accumulation of facts, but with Origin, which is organized so precisely, the suspense comes more from the convincing re-organization of facts - the conclusion is in the introduction, but the suspense comes from being, or waiting to be, convinced.
ReplyDeleteMichael, I completely agree with you about the confessions in the Holmes novels - I remember being so bored by the lengthy confessions in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (way too many Mormons). In the detective story, the time were are interested in is the detective's time, and not the time of the actual events: it is the process of recreation that interests us, and the narrative that evolves from clues (as spelled out by the detective in the denouement) rather than an un-reconstructed account of what happened. As Janie observes, the suspense of the detective novel lies in the organization of the narrative, but I would argue that it is specifically the act of organizing a narrative made visible that is most compelling.
ReplyDeleteOn an unrelated note, I'm glad Prof. Reitz has troubled my characterization of Darwin taking on the roles of both Watson and Holmes: while that does describe some of the experience of reading Darwin, I'm not really comfortable with the anachronism. However, I do think we an identify moments where Darwin is more technical and quantitative as far as he can be - more scientific, maybe - and others where he is more reflective and more attuned to his readers' responses and objections, and in that movement between detection and narration he can occupy both of those positions.
I've read Frank's entire book now, not just the first chapter, and I think I'm less skeptical of the Darwin/Detective link. In fact, I think I'm quite enamored of the idea of Darwin not as "scientist" in the sense that he collects or amasses "clues" (as if they were real objects), but as a man with a romantic imagination that projects itself back to an origin. To bring it more home, it's to assume that the criminal does not, in fact, act mysteriously -- that the way we are now MUST have it's root in the past and we can reconstruct that past by searching for traces and by imagining. If detective fiction does anything ideologically, it's to suggest that these projections are reality.
ReplyDeleteI've done a fair bit of work looking at the history of philology as it relates to colonial discourse. As Frank discusses (though not in this context), philology developed alongside these scientific discourses (even though it has a much older root). In this period, as Said was the first to show us, the ability of England (and of the "West") to define and trace histories was crucial to the imperial project. Postcolonialism critiques this by acknowledging, along with Darwin (quoted in Frank), that these categories are projections that fixed arbitrary distinctions.
In Doyle, the "boring bit" is the confession if we already assume that the detective must be right -- if we've bought into the infallibility of the detective to imagine something that corresponds with something that can be called true. I imagine at the time the confession is important precisely because it confirms the detective's ability and helps to conflate the imagined theory with "truth". In Thug, the detective vanishes from the frame and instead we see only the projection, through ventriloquism (although also showing the signs that something is slipping).
It's interesting to think about the "confession" as boring, because in many detective stories, the confession is the first time the reader is presented with the solution, since we've been kept from knowing all that the detective knows, or suspects. (Although I admit I haven't read those two Holmes novels in a very long time, and I don't remember them enough to recall if I was bored or not). If the story has been well-told, the reader is surprised at least by something in the solution; perhaps she identified a few of the clues or correctly guessed the culprit, but if she has completely figured out the solution before the confession, it seems to me that the story has failed.
ReplyDeleteIf the confession -- the confirmed solution -- can still be boring to the reader even if the revelation surprises her, this, to me, supports a "sensational" reading of detective fiction, in which much of the pleasure stems from the knowledge or sense as one reads that something scary and/or mysterious is happening out of sight, hidden from view. As I've been reading "Lady Audley's Secret," I've been struck by how frankly mystical Braddon's portrayal of Robert Audley's quest is, and of Audley Court itself. It's almost as if there's something decadent about not knowing.
To go back to one of Laura's original questions, about the "spooky stuff" in Darwin -- this is quite an interesting question, and I'm not sure how to answer it. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts on this.
Helen, I had the same experience of reading Lady Audley - there was such much hinting and so little plain exposition in the beginning of the novel, that I was never sure how much I was supposed to know and how much I was just supposed to intuit about the facts of George's disappearance. I think the reader's frustration and anticipation (which could be pleasurable) was highlighted and mirrored in the chapter in which Lady Audley waits for news of the fire. She's all nervous frustration, and, while the reader shares her desire to know the outcome of her arson, the anticipation is also kind of delicious.
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