Saturday, April 13, 2013
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.
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It's interesting to think about that, Rose, the idea that "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." We also see this with Rosanna Spearman. In her letter to Franklin, she recounts coming across his paint-stained nightgown while tidying his room and struggling to interpret it--at first suspecting a late-night tryst between Franklin and Rachel, but then realizing that Rachel would have at least been canny enough to make sure that Franklin had not smudged the door. Rosanna claims that the evidence of the stained nightgown itself was not enough to give her even "the ghost of an idea" that Franklin himself had stolen the Moonstone (325). She does not begin to imagine Franklin as the thief until Penelope tells her that the police suspect her (Penelope) because she was the last person in Rachel's sitting room. Even these two bits of evidence -- the smear on Franklin's nightgown, the hiding place of the diamond -- would not have been enough for Rosanna to feel comfortable suspecting someone (or so she claims). It is actually Rosanna's own desire to believe that Franklin has "lowered himself" to her level that convinces her: "I had believed you to be guilty ... more because I wanted you to be guilty than for any other reason" (329). While the evidence of the nightgown might very well give someone in Rosanna's position adequate reason to suspect Franklin (she also knows about his famous debts), it seems as if Rosanna has erred in prioritizing this desirable evidence rather than weighing it against the rest of what she knows about Franklin Blake's character.
ReplyDeleteIt is also interesting to think that the two women who love Franklin, Rosanna and Rachel, hold the strongest evidence against him from the very beginning--their partial feelings toward Franklin directly frustrate Cuff's investigation. Rosanna stashes away the incriminating nightgown that Cuff is explicitly looking for, while Rachel keeps her silence so well that Cuff suspects her instead. Ironically, their attempts to shield Franklin from the discovery and/or consequences of his actions actually work to shield the true guilty party (Godfrey Ablewhite) from detection.
Having several narrators, as The Moonstone does, seems to be one way of dealing with the problem of grounding the truth. Each point of view might be biased, but their stories can - and, in The Moonstone, for the most part do - hang together. Of course, although this does not seem to be something The Moonstone exploits, such a narrative mode does introduce - at the least the possibility of - yet another ambiguity: the reader must decide for him or herself how the individual narratives fit together, whether they're consistent, what conclusions should be drawn from them. Whether Collins intended this aporia or not, I still do not completely trust Franklin Blake - he seems a little too insistent that he never noticed Roseanna's affection for him.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to consider the transition from Collins's multi-narrator mysteries to Holmes as lone protagonist. Holmes is indeed always right - his solutions to cases inspire applause, not suspicion. There's almost nothing left, after a Holmes story is over, to interpret - at least about the concrete details of the case. I wonder, though, if to sustain our admiration of Holmes's veracity, the stories need to be told from someone else's point of view, and Holmes furthermore needs to be nearly inhuman. If Holmes told the stories, could any reader follow him as trustingly? And if he ever showed even the slightest emotional investment, would his truths lose their ground?
Michael, I find the questions you raise about Holmes - do we trust him because he is a lone detective, framed by a narrator as reliable and disinterested? - really interesting. It seems to me that the work of detection in what we've read so far is both narrative and editorial: it involves the compilation and organization of evidence and witnesses, but also the construction of that into a narrative (as well as narrating the detection itself). Franklin Blake seems to take all of those roles on himself: he is compiling this evidence and these witness statements, but he himself contributes witness statements, but he is also the agent organizing all of this disparate stuff into the narrative, not just of the crime, but of the detection. Maybe this is why the his portion of The Moonstone isn't universally persuasive - because we know that unlike all of the other statements, his has not been subject to a skeptical editorial eye?
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, the classic, Golden Age detective story (in which I'm mentally including Holmes), separates those editorial and narrative roles a bit: Holmes and Poirot are still the compilers of evidence, and still the ones who piece everything together to reconstruct the crime, but that activity is made visible to us via the narration of Watson and Hastings/whatever random bystander Poirot shanghais in a given story. Because we see them through a lens, we know that they are not personally invested, whereas Franklin's narrative is not independently framed for us.
I'm also interested in the questions this issue of framing raises about Lady Audley's secret interesting. Robert Audley's personal investment in his detection is arguably greater than Franklin's - certainly, if we're diagnosing people with detective fever, Robert's is typhoid to Franklin's minor flu, given how completely his detective activities come to dominate his life - but however much we may feel his motives are misrepresented (especially as they relate to his feelings towards George), but we don't question his the accuracy of his narrative.
I think in the case of Holmes, the element of belief is present in Watson's narration. That is to say that Watson has an unerring belief in Holmes's powers of deduction and, in his position as narrator, tends to transmit that same belief to the reader. Perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that the reader first places her faith in Watson's narration; if she accepts him as a reliable narrator, she will accept Holmes as a reliable detective (despite his frequent elusiveness). The persuasiveness of the stories depends on both characters being agents of truth.
ReplyDeleteIn The Moonstone, however, every narrator is slightly unreliable precisely because of his visible system of belief. The reader's belief is predicated, as Michael states "grounding the truth," through a multiplicity of clouded perspectives. Yet of everything we've read (except maybe Confessions of a Thug), I find the "truth" that The Moonstone arrives at the least persuasive. I find that the consensus style of deduction, rather than effectively cornering the truth, highlights the fallibility of perception and subtly undermines empirical knowledge itself.
I wonder, too, what happens when an element that the reader might expect to become a clue or a red herring is left unproven definitively. For instance, the mysticism of the Indians in The Moonstone - something that troubled us during our first class discussion of the novel. Some narrators appear to take it at face value, some to discredit it, but it is pointed out in the novel that the Indians appear to know certain facts about the movements of the Moonstone, and a rational reason for this knowing is never uncovered. The consensus style of deduction works to deduce what has happened (the movements of the Indians) but not how or why. Are the beliefs of the reader assumed to fill in the gaps of belief in the text? Or is this another case of the undermining of empirical knowledge that Lindsay mentions?
ReplyDeleteVery interested in this question of whether empirical knowledge gets undermined. In a sense, Darwinian detection seems to be empirical knowledge par excellence (though of course he is waging a great deal that his narration will enlist belief). This would be contrasted with dream/opium-haze/altered states knowledge (the kind tested in the experiment, or plumbed in psychological investigation). In the opening of SIGN it is suggested that these are parallel states that Holmes shuttles through, perhaps inviting a comparison (or a contrast).
ReplyDeleteI'm interested, also, in the points about the multi-narration. Cuff is one of the narrators. does his narration seem more believable? I feel completely convinced by everything Murthwaite says; certain voices, at least to this reader, complicate a reading of fallible perceptions. I also just want to recall Dickens's detective anecdotes (in the spirit of returning to Dickens tomorrow). The narration there was to invite detectives to tell their own stories, with the exception of "On Duty with Inspector Field" and "Down with the Tide", which I recall you folks suggesting were much more sinister than the first-person accounts.