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Bondage,” 196). Poe’s ambivalent attitude is probably due to a historical ambiguity: in Virginia of the early 19th century, gentleman-planters were “always primarily businessmen” and
“entrepreneurs,” yet “anxious to assume the trappings of an aristocracy” (Gray, Writing the South, 12-3). In a way, their ideal image is in fact a mixture of modern commercialism and feudal
hierarchism, which means that the distinction between the North and the South wasn’t so hard and fast, after all !F29F It is no wonder why Poe states, “There was nothing very distinctive about these two large beyond what I have noted,” grouping people of the different trades with one another in
“The Man of the Crowd.”
In “Reading and Not Reading “The Man of the Crowd”,” Bran Nicol articulates for a multi-level reading of “The Man of the Crowd” because it “is more complex than a relatively straightforward visual mastery or contemplation or reaction to the stimuli of urban experience”
(478). In my opinion, here is one of the complexities of “The Man of the Crowd:” it is a text in which Poe has deliberately dropped the explorations of social relations or problems, just as he has done with “The Murders in Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”F30F On the other hand, with a close reading of the former, Poe’s ambivalent attitude can be perceived, and above all, it can be contextualized historically.
II. How Could the Unsaid Be Said: From Classical to Postmodern:
In Chapter Two, I’ve managed to postulate that the unsaid is equal to the Deleuzean virtual(ity), which is a potentiality that “works as a transcendental condition for the actual by providing a
sufficient reason for whatever happens” (Shaviro, 34). From a narratological perspective, it is simply all the possible case scenarios a narrative could have been. Now the first narrative rupture of
29 Kenneth Silverman, in Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, observes how Poe was vacillating among the contradictory expectations of gentry roles. For instance, he could be courtly with the ladies, a bantam cock in contending with his male literati, a dandyish-looking, heavy drinker, who loved bragging about his physical prowess, such as his swimming feats or running board jumping skills. See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p 30, p123, p197, 332.
30 In Rachman’s opinion, with all the social relations erased or concealed, Poe’s London in “The Man of the Crowd”
has become “a veritable chamber of absorption…The narrator is absorbed in watching a crowd of people absorbed in their tasks, until he is thoroughly absorbed in watching an old man who is thoroughly absorbed in watching the crowd, which is absorbed, or at least unaware of being watched.” He later argues, “Absorption suggests a tropism, an
unaccountable predisposition for intrigue and for temporal dilation,” namely, “the purest form of mystery.” See Rachman, 78, 81.
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Poe’s detective stories has been located: the thematic significance of the setting. If it is a
potentiality, or a “transcendental condition” to be actualized, technically it could be a Manichean choice: whether or not the setting should be associated with the theme.
In A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey comments on Verne’s theme of the island:
The theme is like a tool which no longer has its finished form…and must be made to meet new requirements. The island is first of all a privileged object which can clarify the implications of an ideological series. The theme is both the form of and the reason for the series: its visible image and the law of its succession……The island is a way of showing, linking and ordering ideological objects…(202)
For Macherey, the theme is always open for adjustment because it is an ideological pivot of a literary work; it is a mechanism that aims to arrange and cluster ideological objects.
Where do the ideological objects of a literary work come from? In “Literature as an
Ideological Form,” Balibar and Macherey state, “Literature is not fiction…By a complex process, literature is the production of a certain reality, not indeed…an autonomous reality, but a material reality of a social effect…” (287). They regard literature as a production of a material reality. That is, a certain reality could be materially generated in a text. They choose the word “production” over
“reflection” because literature is not a mirror-like reflection. Literature “translate(s)” reality (“The Problem of Reflection,” 7) and its relationship with reality “is the development of a process of conflict within the reality itself” (15). Roughly speaking, as I’ve argued in Chapter Two, literature is inconsistent with reality; if it should be defined as a reflection, it is an untruthful one partly because, as I’ve already stated, Macherey thinks an author “always reveals or writes from a certain position” (A Theory of Literary Production, 195). Looking awry at the reality or the ideology, the author makes the work his or her own “ideological project” (194). Here is my point: according to Balibar and Macherey, while literature is “a historic and social reality” of its own imprecise reflection, its objective existence has to be connected with “the ensemble of social practices,” or Althusser’s so-called ISA (“Literature as an Ideological Form,” 280). In “The Problem of
Reflection,” Macherey is even more specific, “The reality which realistic art imitates…coincides
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with the ideology of a society or an age…in the transparency of its own myths” (12). Therefore, the answer to the question above is: while a text is producing or partially reflecting reality, ideological objects will make their entry into the text.
The theme of a detective story is a murder, or any other crime, and it should be surrounded by a variety of ideological objects originating from the realistic depictions in the detective story. In Poe’s detective stories, the settings are barely correlated with the theme, which means that it is practically unconnected with the ideological objects (if there are any!). From this point of view, the unsaid may as well be: the setting of a detective story should be pertinent to its ideological
representations. Exploring this narrative rupture is to gauge its distance to the ideological representations.
In constructing my theoretical framework in Chapter Three, I’ve emphasized a key
Machereyan concept: the narrative rupture is in fact an internal contradiction of the ideology. If so, the distance I’ve spoken of is also an internal ideological fracture, speaking of which, it’s time to put Poe and his detective stories in the ideology-ideology-text matrix I’ve elaborated on in Chapter Two. In the 1840’s when Poe’s detective stories were composed, America’s historical reality was featured by capitalization, urbanization, and above all, a society infested with various social problems, which are the sequelae of an industrialized country. By the matrix postulated in Chapter Two, Poe’s detective stories may be embedded in this history. However, the former cannot access the latter, nor can the latter be sufficiently reflected. Most important of all, the ISA had imposed on American people such an ideology: keep accumulation your wealth, and you’ll help to drive the American society forward. This ideology repressed the social problems (or contradictions, as Jameson would term them!). Poe’s detective stories incorporated this ideology but failed to resolve these problems or contradictions. As a consequence, there are internal divisions in Poe’s detective stories, one of which is the gap between Poe’s urban setting descriptions and the theme.
This gap is an internal rift in the ideology, or a narrative absence in Poe’s detective stories. It is due to Poe’s nonchalance, or his ideological positionality, and it manifests Poe’s relation to History.
So far, I’ve endeavored to examine the unsaid in Poe’s detective stories, or to reconstruct their
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subtexts, by Jameson’s terminology. I’ve put forward my hypothesis in Chapter Two: the unsaid is a hoarder of potentialities; once the unsaid is said, a virtuality will be actualized, and another case scenario will be enacted. It is at this point where I must make a crucial clarification: my dissertation is primarily focused on the narrative ruptures of Poe’s detective stories. It does not aim at a detailed account of the history of the detective fiction genre, nor will it articulate nuanced analyses of the major detective novelists at each stage As the title suggests, I will mainly concentrate on studying how these narrative ruptures have been repaired at each stage, in the course of which I intend to use some exemplary, significant texts and authors as my instances.
Classical detective fiction writers do not place a high premium on setting depictions, as it is the logical deductions that have occupied a focal position in their stories. The case/theme is meant to be cracked so that the detective can display his or her reasoning capability; it should not be used for analyzing society (Zhan, Introduction, Last Seen Wearing, 8). “The general critical consensus regarding golden age fiction is that the plot is elevated above all other considerations…” (Scaggs,
Crime Fiction, 35); everything else, including the setting portraiture, is shoved to a secondary
position. If so, the unsaid would remain unsaid; the setting would remain irrelevant to the theme.However, certain prominent writers of classical detective fiction still connect the settings and the themes in their stories. Take Conan Doyle for instance. Some critics, such as Joseph McLaughlin, argue that “in academic discourse, the Holmes tales have been less popular….[and more] ignored because they lack the stylistic complexity, moral ambiguity, and intricate psychology that are the commonplaces of modernism” (Writing the Urban Jungle, 27, italics mine). For them, the Holmes stories are flat and uncomplicated, characterized merely by Holmes’ fantastic inferences. Be that as it may, the “Victorian atmosphere of class, gender, ethnic, national, and racial consciousness [is] so casually apparent in the Holmes narratives” (Hodgson, “Arthur Conan Doyle,” 392, italics mine).
Diane Simmons also argues that a lot of Victorian writers, such as Doyle, had such a “narcissistic fantasy” which “helped shape the understanding of the imperial role, so that finally empire was seen…as the glamorous, heroic and self-defining mission of a superior people” (The Narcissism of
Empire, 2). In such a case, Doyle must taint his urban settings with Victorianism or British
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imperialism:
We had indeed reached a questionable and forbidding neighborhood. Long lines of dull brick houses were only relieved by the coarse glare and tawdry brilliancy of public-houses at the corner. Then came rows of two-storied villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden, and then again interminable lines of new, staring brick buildings － the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country. (The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 103-4)
The quoted passage is from Doyle’s The Four Signs. In the story, Holmes and Watson eventually arrives at a house of an “Oriental figure,” where an Indian “sahib” lives. Jon Thompson states that in Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle combines “ideologically charged conventions from adventure, detective, and sensational literature” with “strategies of exclusion,” which refer to how Sherlock Holmes contains and controls colonial contaminations (Fiction, Crime, and Empire, 73). If so, the message Doyle wishes to convey in this passage is most evident: the neighborhood has turned
“questionable and forbidding” because it has been invaded by the colonized subjects of the British empire, like the Indians; “the monster tentacles” of their inhabitation have been kept away from central London, the heart of the British Empire, which surely indicates that these alien, colonial contaminations have remained containable, and that the whole empire has still been held together tight. It is noteworthy that in many of the Holmes stories, “not only the manner of the crime but also the inclination to commit it should be attributed to the criminal’s contact with an alien culture”
(Harris, “Pathological Possibilities,” 452, italics mine). With such British imperialism thinking deeply rooted in the narratives, the urban descriptions of London in the Holmes stories can’t possibly be accurate. Readers must be aware that the accounts in Sherlock Holmes stories “are far closer to fiction than many Victorians with confidence in reason and scientific progress might acknowledge” (Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction, 158).F31F To sum up, Doyle does connect the
31 In Pragmatics and Fiction, J. K. Adams suggests an examination of the settings in Sherlock Holmes stories from the perspective of narrative transportation. He first states that “since we cannot meet fictional character…we cannot go to any place that would make such a meeting possible.” Therefore, “in the case of the Sherlock Holmes stories, there must be two Londons, each with itsown Baker Street, one in our world and one in Sherlock Holmes’ world. And since we cannot enter a fictional world and since fictional characters cannot enter our world, fictional characters remain unaware of the real world and are, therefore, unable to talk about it.” Richard J. Gerrig, in Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, thinks that Adams has hinted at the possibility that “readers treat Sherlock
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urban settings with the themes in an imperialistic manner: with each case (, mostly concerned with the alien invasion,) occurring in London, the British Empire is temporarily endangered.
Another notable example is Agatha Christie. In Christie’s fiction, the settings are seldom modern cities. Instead, most of her 68 novels are set in the background of rural, suburban areas. The ordered world in her stories seem completely untouched by the realities of postwar Britain; it has seemed like a nostalgic recreation of prewar society, basking in the Edwardian sunlight (Grossvogel,
“Agatha Christie,” 264). Christie is always “presenting an idealized landscape shaped to fit the prejudices of their middle-class audience” (Chernaik, “Mean Streets and English Gardens,” 105).
“Prejudice is…not a hindrance to understanding but a condition of the possibility of understanding”
(Holub, Reception Theory, 41). On the other hand, James Phelan points out that “the world we experience in novels are more than worlds of words; they are, more accurately, worlds from words…which are more central to our experience…”(Worlds from Words, 116). That is, even if Christie has set her stories in the background of rural England because it is symbolic of an ideal, bourgeoisie ease and comfort, it does not diminish the attractiveness of its texts. And of course, such a setting depiction is inaccurate, like Doyle’s, as Linden Peach argues, “English middle class between the wars …was not a coherent group.” However, detective fiction such as Christie’s “is something of a masquerade. Setting false trails for the reader and presenting them with what is not as it might appear, [it] has at its heart duplicity and performance” (Masquerade, Crime, and Fiction, 105-6, italics mine). For instance, in Dead Man’s Folly, Poirot is driven to the countryside:
They drove away from the station over the railway bridge and turned down a country lane which would between high hedges on either side. Presently the ground fell away on the right and disclosed a very beautiful river view with hills of a misty blue in the distance…It was clear that admiration was necessary. Poirot made the necessary noises, murmuring Magnifique! Several times. Actually, Nature appeared to him very little. A well-cultivated neatly arranged kitchen garden was far more likely to bring a murmur of admiration to Poirot’s lips. (12)
Holmes’s London as the real London.” As a result, readers tend to be transported into this London. See J. K. Adams, Pragmatics and Fiction.(Amsterdam: John Benjamin,1985), p 21-2. Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds:
On the Psychological Activities of Reading.( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p26.
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The quoted passage is distinctly redolent of an easy, bourgeoisie aura. It’s so apparent that Christie has glossed over the fragmented, unsatisfactory social realities of England then, and presented an idealized, illusory picture of a middle-class life. Most of all, it is against such background that a crime is committed. “Civilization may house barbarity within its walls. The urbanity of the bishop, the librarian, the professor may be the mask of savagery” (Swales, Introduction, The Art of
Detective Fiction, xvi). That is, this is how Christie connects her setting with the theme of her
fiction: a hideous crime is in stark contrast with the serene bourgeoisie world in Christie’s fiction;the former is like an error in the latter that needs to be redressed.
As Doyle leans towards British imperialism, Christie sides with the bourgeoisie culture. In Balibar and Macherey’s words, Christie’s fiction is “a privileged operator in the concrete relation between the individual and ideology in bourgeoisie society;” this ideology is “the dominant ideology of the ruling class,” which will create “an effect of domination” or facilitate “the subjection of individuals” (“Literature as an Ideological Form,” 292). If so, both bourgeoisie ideology and British imperialism thinking could be subsumed under the category of Eagleton’s GI:
A dominant ideological formation is constituted by a relatively coherent set of ‘discourses’ of values…, so reflect the experiential relations of individual subjects to their social conditions as to guarantee those misperceptions of the ‘real’ which contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations. (54)
By Eagleton’s definition, GI functions as a mechanism of assuring “misperceptions of the ‘real’.”
Now that both Holmes and Christie have given distorted setting descriptions, they are actually drawing close to GI. That is, as they have said the unsaid and tapped the potentiality, they have enacted a case scenario for the detective fiction genre: a genre tied with GI.
For hard-boiled detective fiction, it’s a completely different story. Hard-boiled detective fiction is basically a response to the social, economic, and political outlook of the 1920’s American society (Pepper, ““The Hard-Boiled” Genre,” 140). More often than not, it depicts the corruption at the heart of the U.S. political and economic life (Worpole, Dockers and Detectives, 43). That is to say, hard-boiled detective novelists always move murder mysteries to “the mean streets, sterile
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architecture, and dysfunctional families of urban America,” “a ravaged social and physical environment…of the bleakness enveloping the postindustrial world” (O’Sullivan, “Ecological Noir,” 119). For instance, in William Campbell Gault’s Ring Around Rosa, a beneficent image of L.A. seems to be given, but in fact “there is an undertow…that reminds one…of the skull beneath the skin” (Moore, 65) just as the quote from the 1997 film Escape From L.A., “the city of Los Angels is ravaged by crime and immorality.”. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is another typical example, which is set in a medium-sized Montana town, Personville:
The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone it for gaudiness…Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into a uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people…Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks. (3-4)
Wth its gloomy ambience, Personville is crowded, grimy, and ugly city, where the organized criminal elements have threatened the protagonist and his family (Moore, 64). Another typical example is Tana French’s The Likeness, which is set in Dublin:
For ten years Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and the starting all over again, and we’re fracturing under the weight of it. By the end of my stint in Murder I could feel it coming: felt the high sing of madness in the air, the city hunching and twitching like a rabid dog building towards the rampage. Sooner or later, someone had to pull the first horror case. (11-2)
In The Likeness, Dublin is suffering the consequences of its economic boom; it has become a filthy,
In The Likeness, Dublin is suffering the consequences of its economic boom; it has become a filthy,