This document discusses the relationship between high culture and popular/mass culture. It argues that just as mythology and psychoanalysis were important to modernism, the detective story genre is important to postmodernism. It also argues that kitsch (popular culture) and the avant-garde are not as mutually exclusive as often thought, and there is a dialectical relationship between the two. Popular culture provides reassurance while avoiding difficulties, whereas high culture aims to create difficulty and ask deeper questions. The detective story genre in particular has become a vessel for philosophical and metaphysical questions in postmodern literature.
This document discusses the relationship between high culture and popular/mass culture. It argues that just as mythology and psychoanalysis were important to modernism, the detective story genre is important to postmodernism. It also argues that kitsch (popular culture) and the avant-garde are not as mutually exclusive as often thought, and there is a dialectical relationship between the two. Popular culture provides reassurance while avoiding difficulties, whereas high culture aims to create difficulty and ask deeper questions. The detective story genre in particular has become a vessel for philosophical and metaphysical questions in postmodern literature.
This document discusses the relationship between high culture and popular/mass culture. It argues that just as mythology and psychoanalysis were important to modernism, the detective story genre is important to postmodernism. It also argues that kitsch (popular culture) and the avant-garde are not as mutually exclusive as often thought, and there is a dialectical relationship between the two. Popular culture provides reassurance while avoiding difficulties, whereas high culture aims to create difficulty and ask deeper questions. The detective story genre in particular has become a vessel for philosophical and metaphysical questions in postmodern literature.
This document discusses the relationship between high culture and popular/mass culture. It argues that just as mythology and psychoanalysis were important to modernism, the detective story genre is important to postmodernism. It also argues that kitsch (popular culture) and the avant-garde are not as mutually exclusive as often thought, and there is a dialectical relationship between the two. Popular culture provides reassurance while avoiding difficulties, whereas high culture aims to create difficulty and ask deeper questions. The detective story genre in particular has become a vessel for philosophical and metaphysical questions in postmodern literature.
Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction
Author(s): Michael Holquist
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn, 1971), pp. 135-156 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468384 . Accessed: 02/11/2014 08:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction Michael Holquist I HIs paper seeks to make two points: first, what the structural and philosophical presuppositions of myth and depth psychol- ogy were to Modernism (Mann, Joyce, Woolfe, etc.), the detective story is to Post-Modernism (Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Nabokov, etc.); secondly, if such is the case, we will have established a relation- ship between two levels of culture, kitsch and the avant-garde, often thought to be mutually exclusive. II Popular culture is a skeleton in our academic closets. And like other disturbing topics it generates discourse which seems inevitably to end in a polarity. Clement Greenberg states the dilemma very clearly: One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover . . . a poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest-what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to relate them in an enlightening relation to each other?" 1 Greenberg's uneasiness is shared by the majority of critics who have addressed the problem at all.2 He and many others find disturbing I "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), p. 98. 2 A brilliant (and occasionally hysterical) case in point would be Gunther Anders' essay, "The Phantom World of TV," also in Mass Culture, pp. 358-367. Further evidence may be found in Gillo Dorfles' Kitsch, an Anthology of Bad Taste (London, 1969); Karlheinz Deschner, Kitsch, Konvention und Kunst (Miinchen, 1962); Walter Nutz, Der Trivialroman: seine Formen und seine Hersteller (K61n und Opladen, 2-e Auflage, 1966); and two rich collections of essays: Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel, Horst Enders, et al, eds. Trivialliteratur (Berlin, 1964), and Norman Jacobs, ed., Culture for the Millions: Mass Media in Modern Society (Boston, 1964). This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 136 NEW LITERARY HISTORY what appears to be an absolute cut off between their own traditions and responses, and those of the millions who sit beer can in hand, glued to the television set. In this view the distance between Sophocles and the sit-com, the museum and the dime-store seems immeasurable. And it no doubt is if seen as so many sociologists do, as a static syn- chronic relationship. But the cultural historian perceives a different, more dynamic and ultimately a more hopeful connection between popular and high culture. Viewed historically it is clear that there has been and continues to be a dialectical apposition between the two poles. In order for our argument to proceed it is not necessary to advance new definitions for terms we are using, each of which has a history. Rather we shall appeal to the cliches which have grown up around each. Kitsch and the avant-garde are both in a problematic relationship to the main stream tradition of high culture, which is perhaps most economically defined by the curricula of our universities. A college catalogue is a kind of telephone book for the city of culture. In the area of literature thumb-nail descriptions of culture may be found in all those courses which begin the first semester with Homer and the Bible. These models are to college graduates what the oral tradition is to the savage. Not included in such lists will be works defined by those who compile them as being below the canon (kitsch) or beyond it (avant-garde). Both phenomena are of relatively recent origin, a point which has been made for kitsch by Gillo Dorfles3 and for the avant garde by Renato Poggioli.4 Why both tendencies should have not developed earlier is an exceedingly complex question. But certainly mass industrialization might be adduced as a cause in both cases. Kitsch springs not from artists or craftsmen, but from the machine. Our increasingly sophisticated technology represents new possibilities for mass culture. At the same time it represents a new threat to the avant-garde. As has so often been pointed out, newly developed means for the rapid and widespread transmission of ideas have relentlessly closed the distance between what is known to the 3 ". ... in every age before our own, there was no such thing as ... kitsch .... In ages other than our own, particularly in antiquity, art had a completely different function compared to modern times; it was connected with religious, ethical or political subject matter, which made it in a way 'absolute,' unchanging, eternal (always of course within a given cultural milieu)." Dorfles, op. cit., pp. 9-1o. P. O. Kristeller argues that the interdependence of art and other human activities and concerns, such as those cited by Dorfles, broke down somewhere at the end of the 17th, beginning of the I8th century, in his magisterial survey of the problem: "The Modern System of the Arts." Renaissance Studies II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York, 1965), pp. 163-227. 4 ". .. it is by now an undoubted fact that the term and concept of avant-garde art reach no further back in time than the last quarter of the past century." The Theory of the Avant-Garde, tr. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York, 1971), p. 13. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS I37 cognoscenti and to the man in the street. Today's experiment becomes tomorrow's habit: Reproductions of Jackson Pollock paintings are to be found in motel rooms all across the country. The more uniform mass culture becomes, the more violently the avant-garde strains after idiosyncrasy, creating a situation in which the truth of an old dichotomy becomes daily more apparent: art is diffi- cult, kitsch is easy. The difficulty of experimental art in the last one hundred years hardly needs demonstrating. But the assumption of mass culture that everything is, or should be, understandable, easily and quickly accessible, bears some further reflection. Kitsch seems to appropriate art by robbing it of the demonic, not just its "aura" as Walter Benjamin has argued,5 but its dangers. Even if you assume that art is therapeutic, you must first experience the pity and terror of a tragedy before winning the catharsis it may then provide. Such unsettling emotions are precisely what kitsch operates against in its urge to avoid all difficulties, whether of perception, execution, or reception. It gives not pain, but bromides, not deep questions, but easy answers. It opposes to Hamlet's dilemna the advice of the gum huckster: "Chew your little troubles away." Gunther Anders has suggested that the best metaphor for kitsch may be modem travel: For modern man does not attach value to his travelling because of any interest in the regions he visits, actually or vicariously; he does not travel to become experienced but to still his hunger for omnipresence and for rapid change as such. . . . A publicity poster of a well-known airline, utterly confusing provincialism and globalism, appeals to its customers with these words: "When you use our services, you are everywhere at home." 6 Tourists travel from the Istanbul Hilton to the Athens Hilton, the only differences being in the quality of the plumbing and the "motif" of the hotel restaurants. There is no strangeness. Our international air- ports are all the same; they collectively constitute a country all their own, have more in common with each other than they have with the countries in which they are actually located. And that is what kitsch is-a country all its own, unlike any other, but giving the sense of reassuring sameness. It is not real, but it is familiar. If so much is assumed, we may differentiate between various genres of literary kitsch by focusing on the particular pattern of reassurance 5 In: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York, I969), pp. 217-252. 6 Mass Culture, p. 364. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 138 NEW LITERARY HISTORY each provides. For instance, it is clear that much recent spy fiction is aimed at allaying fears aroused by two human activities which seem to have got out of human control, science on the one hand and diplomacy on the other. The pattern of spy thrillers changes quite markedly after Hiroshima. Instead of the elegant, patriotic heroes of E. Phillips Oppenheim, who merely prevent one or two countries from going to war (by stealing naval secrets, or something equally innocu- ous), we now have amoral supermen who save the entire planet from atomic destruction-the suggestion being that while the world may be full of mad scientists and bumbling statesmen, a lone hero can still keep us all from being blown up. At a time when enormous destruction is in the hands of faceless committees, it is reassuring indeed to follow the adventures of a single man who, by exploiting the gifts of courage and resourcefulness which have always characterized the hero, can offset the ineffectiveness of government as well as the irresponsibility of the scientists. The same pattern of easy reassurance is to be found in the increas- ingly less comic comic strips, where, as in Dick Tracy, the brutality of crime is always overcome by the brutality of Chester Gould. Other strips have become the elephant's graveyard for those novels which really are dead: On Stage is a Frauenroman in pictures, constantly engaging issues of current concern (the generation gap, women's lib, etc.) merely to provide easy answers only slightly more sophisticated than the equally formulaic "they all lived happily ever after." So much for generalities. What, then, is the particular pattern of reassurance provided by detective fiction? In order to answer this question we must first of all determine what is meant by detective story, and in order to do that a brief look at its history will be necessary. III Very little crime fiction is of the classical detective story variety. Crime is very old, detective fiction very new. There have always been critics ready to see crime fiction everywhere, such as Peter Haworth,7 who puts forward as examples of the genre such ancient tales as the "History of Sussanah" from the Apocrypha, the story of King Rhamp- sinitus' treasure house from Herodotus, tales from the Gesta Roma- norum, etc. Regis Messac8 begins his study of the genre with Archi- medes' discovery of his famous principle of hydrostatics. A. E. Murch's 7 In: Classic Crimes in History and Fiction (New York, 1927). 8 Le "Detective Novel" et l'influence de la pensee scientifique (Paris, 1929), p. 54. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 139 standard history9 opens with I7th century British rogue tales, such as Dekker's The Belman of London (16o8). And it has long been a favorite trick of classicists to teach Oedipus Rex as a detective story. Such eclectic definitions of the genre create obvious difficulties. What is meant in this paper by detective story is rather the tale of pure puzzle, pure ratiocination, associated with Poe, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie. As Jacques Barzun and W. H. Taylor have recently written: "A detective story should be mainly occupied with detect- ing," 10 which would exclude gothic romances, psychological studies of criminals, and hard-boiled thrillers. The paradox that there is nevertheless no detective fiction before the 19th century can be explained in many ways, all too complicated to go into here, except for adducing the obvious reason that you cannot have detective fiction before you have detectives. It is a curious fact that the institution of the modern metropolitan police force as we now know it did not exist before the 19th century. It was the early decades of that century which saw the almost simultaneous foundation of the Suret6 in Paris and the precursors of Scotland Yard, the Bow Street Runners, in London. But the foundation of these forces was not enough in itself to inspire the creation of the fictional detective. For one thing they did not immediately inspire confidence in their methods or their morals. One of the founders of the Surete was Eugene Fran?ois Vidocq (1775- 1857), a notorious thief and adventurer whose early successes in the bureau were made possible by his intimate-indeed personal-knowl- edge of the French underworld. In 1828 he published his Mimoires, which contain improbable and hyperbolic accounts of his double life. It is a fact that this fictive account has had a greater effect on the history of detective stories than his actual career with the historical Suret6. As for the Bow Street Runners, we have the words of Dickens himself, that they "kept company with thieves and such like . . ." and were to be found in the lowest and most degraded gin mills, where they were quite at home.11 It took some time before people believed in the police as forces for good. And this bit of historical sociology explains, in a small way, why the rise of the practicing detective did not coincide with the rise of tales and novels about him. Because the emphasis was still on crime; 9 The Development of the Detective Novel (New York, 1958). Io A Catalogue of Crime (New York, I97I), p. 5. I In an I862 letter to W. Thornbury, quoted by Dorothy Sayers in her essay "The Omnibus of Crime," The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York, 1946), p. 75. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 140 NEW LITERARY HISTORY the forces of law had not yet become glamorous. It had always been true, of course, that while evil was reprehensible, it was also fascinating in a way virtue simply was not. Thus the few genres which may lay claim to the title of criminal-but not detective-fiction before the 19th century, have as their heroes the villains who were hanged at Tyburn, in such romances as Francis Kirkman's The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (1673) or Elkanah Settle's The Complete Memoires of the Life of that Notorious Imposter Will Morrell (1694). The degree to which these and other such I7th century criminal biographies depart from the tradition of the true detective story may be gleaned from the fact that such tales are today remembered mainly for the role they played in establishing the tradition of the realistic novel.12 No, we must restate the reason for the seemingly tardy development of detective fiction: We said it had to wait for the historical advent of the institution of the detective. We must now add that the detective who made detective fiction possible was himself a fiction: Detective stories have their true genesis not in Vidocq or any other real life detective. The father of them all, is, rather, Edgar Allan Poe's Che- valier Dupin. We may argue about the birth of tragedy, whence arose comedy, the antiquity of the lyric or the rise of the novel. But about the first detective story there can be no such uncertainty. We know the precise time and place of its origin. It was in Graham's Magazine of April, 1841, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. that The Murders in the Rue Morgue appeared, and the character which there made his entrance, sprung full blown from the bulging brow of Poe, has, under different aliases, been with us ever since. Why is Poe the creator of the classical detective story? A clue may be found in Joseph Wood Krutch's statement to the effect that "Poe invented the detective story that he might not go mad." 13 Poe's biography, of course, is a paradigm for that of the romantic artist: 14 a precociously brilliant child, raised by foster parents, a 17 year old drop-out from the University of Virginia, then a drop-out 12 See, for instance, Spiro Peterson, "Foreword," The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth Century England (New York, i96i), p. Xi1. 13 Quoted in Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York, I94I), p. 9. 14 Richard Alewyn ("Das R~itsel des Detektivromans" in Definitionen: Essays zur Literatur, ed. Adolf Fris6 [Frankfurt a. M., 1963]) has argued that the detective novel is a product not of Rationalism or Realism, but of Romanticism (p. 136). As support for this he outlines the biography of an archetypal romantic artist, charged with a sense of the everyday world as only a thin layer of deception over an abyss of dark symbols which the artist seeks to penetrate. Alewyn then asks "Could one better describe the talent and the profession of the detective?" (p. 135). This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 141 from his father's business, dismissal from West Point in a scandal-his beloved child bride wasting away of an incurable disease, a life de- voted to art, but threatened by heavy drinking and drugs. He died on an uncompleted journey, after being found wandering the streets of Baltimore in a raving delirium. The world was a place of chaos for Poe, a vale not only of tears, but also of unspeakable horrors; some- times he caught this world in the metaphor of a crumbling mansion, haunted amidst its weird landscape; at other times it was the black labyrinthine canals of Renaissance Venice, or the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom. But it is in the very depths to which he experienced, and was able to capture in words, the chaos of the world, that we must search for the key to the ordered, ultra-rational world of the detective story. It was to this powerful impulse toward the irrational that he opposed the therefore necessarily potent sense of reason which finds its highest expression in The Murders in Rue Morgue and The Pur- loined Letter. Against the metaphors for chaos, found in his other tales, he sets, in the Dupin stories, the essential metaphor for order: the detective. The detective, the instrument of pure logic, able to triumph because he alone in a world of credulous men, holds to the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things, the belief that the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. There are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning. This is the enabling discovery Poe makes for later authors; he is the Columbus who lays open the world of radical rationality which is where detectives have lived ever since. Consider some of the other specific conventions which Poe first uses: the first if exceedingly awkward use of the least likely person theme; the first instance of the scattering of false clues by the real criminal; and the first extortion of a confession by means of the psychological third de- gree.. .15 Poe created the transcendent and eccentric detective; the admiring and slightly stupid foil; the well-intentioned floundering and unimaginativeness of the official guardians of the law; the locked room convention; . . . deduction by putting oneself in another's position . . .; concealment by means of the ultra obvious; the staged ruse to force the culprit's hand; even the expansive and condescending explanation when the chase is done,. ..16 These are the basic conventions of the classical detective story, and so 15 Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure, p. Io. I6 Ibid., p. 12. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 142 NEW LITERARY HISTORY fixed are they that some of the more hallowed among them are actually included in an oath which must be taken by new members of the British association of detective story writers, the Detection Club. Con- sider, for example, the following two articles which must be sworn to: Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the Reader?- Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, trap-doors, Chinamen, . .. and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons Unknown to Science? 17 The vow not to use ghosts and death rays may seem amusing-cer- tainly in their elephantine way, the founders of the club intended it to be so; but it contains great wisdom too. For these elements are foreign to the world of the detective story-they belong to other worlds of sheer convention, pure fiction, the ghost story and science fiction. There is an important point to be learned about conventions here. They do not exist in isolation; to do their work they must determine whole land- scapes, conjure up specific plots which are peculiar to them alone. Conventions must be familiar. Each fictive world has its own magic, its own form of reassuring omnipotence. In the fairy tale, a good heart and patience in the face of misfortune will always avail; so, in cowboy stories, will a good heart and a quick gun. In spy stories a peculiar kind of committed amorality coupled with an ability to survive unusual amounts (and kinds) of physical punishment overcome atomic destruction again and again. In the Tarzan novels great physical strength and intimacy with nature conquers all. (Tarzan is, in a sense, the last of the noble savages. He is, it will be remembered, a member of the House of Lords.) We have spoken of several sub-genres of popular literature, each of which is defined by its own system of conventions and its own re- assuring magic. The basic clich6s of the detective story especially should now be clear. But what is its peculiar magic, how does it re- assure in a way other popular modes do not? Its magic is, as we saw in the case of Poe, the power of reason, mind if you will. It is not, as is so often said, the character of great detectives which accounts for their popularity.18 If character means anything, we must admit that most of them have very little of it. Take Sherlock Holmes, for example. He does not really exist when he is not on a case. The violin, the drugs 17 Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, p. 198. I8 As, for instance, William S. Baring-Gould: "What we may ask, inspires the great devotion to [Sherlock] Holmes displayed by three generations of readers? ... it is the character of Holmes that grips us . .. .", in his Introduction to The Adventures of the Speckled Band and other Stories of Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1965), p. xi. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 143 merely keep him in a state of suspended animation until the inevitable knock on the door comes, announcing a new problem. He does not solve crimes, he solves puzzles. There is no death in his world-only the statement of riddles. You will remember that famous bit of "Sherlockismus" which begins, "I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime." Watson says, "The dog did nothing in the nighttime." And Holmes replies, "That was the curious incident." This is a metaphor for what happens in all the stories. Nothing really happens, but it is all therefore curious. Holmes is less a detective than a mathematician; he is his function. Therefore other people simply are not people for him. Watson is regarded, as he himself admits in an unguarded moment, as merely "the whetstone for [Sherlock's] mind." The degree to which Holmes is pure mind may also be seen in the official iconography of him; in the later illustrations he is all nose and bulging brow.19 It is this supremely rational quality which accounts for the popularity of such stories-the magic of mind in a world that all too often seems impervious to reason. Popular-but with whom? Detective stories, at least of the sort we are here concerned with, are not popular in the sense everyone reads them. Who does? Not surprisingly-in light of what we've said about their emphasis on mind-it is largely intel- lectuals who keep Agatha Christie and Rex Stout writing into an indecent old age.20 Not only do intellectuals read detective stories, they write them. It is significant that in such tales the body is usually discovered in the library, for their authors tend to be oppressively bookish. Many of them are scholars of real note, such as Michael Innes, in real life, J. I. M. Stewart, a well known expert on the modern novel and one of the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, or Nicholas Blake, in real life C. Day Lewis, Oxford professor of Poetry from 1951-1956, and translator of Virgil's Aeneid; or Dorothy Sayers, one of the first women to receive an Oxford degree and a ranking Dante translator and critic. The list could be extended to include American academics,21 19 He begins to look something like Edgar Allan Poe, as a matter of fact. 20 This is difficult to prove, of course, but it is taken for granted by most students of the subject. See, for instance, Marjorie Nicolson's delightful essay, "The Professor and the Detective," in Haycraft's Art of the Mystery Story, pp. 11o-127. It is clear, at any rate, that detective fiction is the one aspect of popular culture which most exercises the imagination of intellectuals. 21 For example, chosen at random: C. Daly King, Yale Ph.D. and author of several books on psychology, as well as at least six detective novels, all written in the I930's, or Alfred Harbage, the Elizabethan scholar and professor at Harvard; Walter Blair, expert on American humor, professor at Chicago. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 144 NEW LITERARY HISTORY who, for some reason, cling much more tenaciously to their pseudonyms. But for every intellectual who writes detective fiction, there are several more who write about it.22 And when they do, some very strange things happen. Consider what W. H. Auden has to say on the subject. Such tales are an occasion to write about sin and purga- tion: I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. From the point of view of ethics, desires and acts are good and bad, and I must choose the good and reject the bad, but the I which makes this choice is ethically neutral; it only becomes good or bad in its choice. To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which however 'good' I may become, remains unchanged.23 This quote is from an essay on the detective story, and one can't help suspecting its aim of rationalization; the product not of the guilt about which Auden is here so eloquent, but rather of the guilt of reading detective stories. Auden's friend, C. Day Lewis, perhaps because he writes them, has even more extravagant claims to make for detective stories. We may imagine some James Frazier of the year 2042 discoursing on 'The Detective Novel-the Folk-Myth of the 20th Century.' He will, I fancy, connect the rise of crime fiction with the decline of religion at the end of the Victorian era . . . When a religion has lost its hold upon men's hearts they must have some other outlet for the sense of guilt . . [the future anthropologist] will call attention to the pattern of the detective novel, as highly formalized as that of a religious ritual, with its initial necessary sin (the murder), its victim, its high priest ( the detective). He will conjecture-and rightly--that the devotee identified himself both with the detective and the murderer, representing the dark sides of his own nature. He will note a significant parallel between the formalized denoue- ment of the detective novel and the Christian conception of the Day of Judgement, when with a flourish of trumpets, the mystery is made plain and the goats are separated from the sheep.24 22 We have already mentioned Jacques Barzun; one might also cite Jacques Lacan's essay on "The Purloined Letter" ("Le s6minaire sur 'La lettre vol6e,' " Ecrits, I [Paris, 1966] pp. 19-78); or W. K. Wimsatt's critique of Poe's work on the mystery of Mary Rogers (PMLA, LVI [1941], 230-248). Gide's fascination with American hard boiled fiction is well known. As George Grella has written, "the detective story, unlike most kinds of popular literature, prizes intellectual gifts above all." ("Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel," Novel, IV [197o], 36). 23 "The Guilty Vicarage," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1968), p. 158. 24 "The Detective Story-Why," in Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, p. 399. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS I45 C. Day Lewis, like Matthew Arnold, fears that religion has declined.25 Arnold hopes literature-high culture-will take its place. Lewis sug- gests detective stories have taken its place. It can be shown that in a sense, Arnold was right; literature in the modern period did try, con- sciously or unconsciously, to substitute for religion. But Lewis has completely missed the point about detective stories, particularly the ones he has in mind. The moulders of the Modernist tradition, however, sensed, as did Arnold, that Christianity was losing its power to console and explain, to flood a hostile world with meaning. Such masters as Joyce and Mann sought to fill this religious void with different symbols, more often than not taken from mythical systems older than Christianity. Mann is exceedingly self-conscious about his own attempts to light the Christmas tree of the world again, as can be seen in his account of how Dr. Faustus grew into a novel, and in the published correspondence he had with Karoly Ker6nyi.2 The case of Ulysses is obvious. Eliot appends learned footnotes to The Wasteland, explaining his symbols on the basis of work done by Sir James Frazer and Jesse L. Weston. Yeats' whole life is a search for a mythical system on which he could ground his poetry. And they all used-in one way or another-Freud, who when confronted by the death of God in the universe, discovered a new cosmos inside man himself. The Freudian system gave a new- and profound-dimension to all symbols, independent of, or under- lying, whatever religious meaning they might (or more importantly, might not) still have. Modernism had dual roots in psychology and myth, Freud and Frazer were the Siamese twins who presided muse-like at the creation of The Waves or Ulysses. The emphasis was on the innermost inner life, resulting in a psychological impulse that was lyrical, non-societal, relational-constantly exposing itself to the danger of aesthetic solip- sism. Nineteenth century novels had unfolded in an extreme spec- ificity of time and place-there is a sense in which they are all historical novels. They took place in Paris or London, whereas Mod- ernist novels essentially take place in a country of the mind, inside. To this degree they are ahistorical, their time is Bergsonian, not chronological. Thus these works are marked by an emphasis on re- 25 It is significant that so many authors of detective stories were in one way or another deeply involved with religious issues. Lewis is also a well known apologist for Anglican Christianity, as was Dorothy Sayers in her later years. Ronald Knox, a student and author of detective fiction, was also a theologian, indeed a monsignor. G. K. Chesterton's Catholicism is as present in his Father Brown stories as in his essays. 26 Gespriich in Briefen (ZiUrich, I96o). This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 146 NEW LITERARY HISTORY curring patterns of experience, those paradigmatic human occasions that seem to happen outside of time: the trauma of being cast into the world in birth, the sorrows of travel, the joys of love, and the mystery of death. These are the matter of all art, but in the Modernist period there was a conscious attempt to get at the archetypal ahistorical meaning of such events, and the most frequent method for doing so was to dramatize subtly-and sometimes not so subtly-parallels be- tween archetypal occurrences of ancient myth and modern experience, much as Freud was to seek a pattern in the Oedipus story which would unlock certain secrets of 20oth century behaviour. Now is it precisely during the 20o's and 30's of this century, when Modernism was in its deep-diving prime, achieving its most completely realized persons and its densest world, that the detective story had its golden age. It is a period when the two strands, experimental litera- ture-high culture, on the one hand, and popular literature-the detective story, on the other, are more than ordinarily split in their techniques, basic assumptions and effect. It is the age when Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy Sayers, and Michael Innes, to name only a few, are at their peak. And far from seeking to populate the corporeal world with symbols, they are concerned further to purify their own narrow world of impossibly eccentric Oxbridge colleges, im- probably quaint little English villages, that hermetic world of cruise ships, the Blue trains, and week-ends at country houses. Plots become more outr6 (such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), weapons more exotic (such as poisoned toothpaste)-but the basic conventions re- mained essentially unchanged. A small digression is in order here: during the I930's there did arise a new (if we exclude Wilkie Collins in the I9th century) kind of detective story represented in England by Dorothy Sayers' new style which became apparent after her I935 novel Gaudy Night, and represented in America by Raymond Chandler and later Dashiell Ham- mett. The British and American types are quite distinct from each other, but both have in common an attempt to break away from the rigid conventions of detective fiction. Each strand resulted in stories of crime which depended for their appeal on the devices of mainstream fiction; literature, if you will. They sought to write novels not detective novels as such. The characters were more fully rounded, the settings more ordinary-or at least less formulaic-the plots less implausible. The detective is more human and so are the criminals and victims. You get, at least in the hard-boiled American school, something more like real blood, actual corpses instead of mere excuses for yet another demonstration of the detective's superhuman skills. Chandler did for This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 147 detective fiction what John Le Carre was later to do for spy fiction. Books in this third--call it novelistic-stream (Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald and Donald Hamilton continue the tradition in America, as Graham Greene and James Hadley Chase did in Eng- land)-books in this third stream are obviously not-whatever their other merits may be-what I have been talking about as the classical detective story. The third stream is impure-and I mention it only as an exception. But to return to our argument: it was during the same period when the upper reaches of literature were dramatizing the limits of reason by experimenting with such irrational modes as myth and the sub- conscious, that the lower reaches of literature were dramatizing the power of reason in such figures as Inspector Poirot and Ellery Queen. What must be remembered here is that it is essentially the same group of intellectuals who were reading both. We began by assuming that literature is difficult, popular literature easy, and we are now in a position to be more specific about this formulation: What is difficult about a Mann novel, for example, is not only its style and architechtonic complexities, but-and perhaps above all-its unsettling message: all the certainties of the 19th century-positivism, scientism, historicism- seem to have broken down. Dangerous questions are raised, the world is a threatening, unfamiliar place, inimical more often than not to reason. Is it not natural to assume, then, that during this period when rationalism is experiencing some of its most damaging attacks, that intellectuals, who experienced these attacks first and most deeply, would turn for relief and easy reassurance to the detective story, the primary genre of popular literature which they, during the same period, were, in fact, consuming? The same people who, spent their days with Joyce were reading Agatha Christie at night-and if the pattern of reassurance we've adduced as peculiar to the detective story is accepted, we should not long have to wonder why. At any rate, in order for our argument to proceed, it is necessary only to keep in mind the polar opposition between the high art of the novel with its bias toward myth and depth psychology and the popular art of the detective story with its flatness of character and setting dur- ing the flowering of Modernism. Because it is just this opposition which is bridged in the period following World War II. Post-Modernism-or at least that strand of it which here concerns us and which is arguably the most defining strand-can best be under- stood as springing from a different view of man, and therefore a different view of art from that which obtained in Modernism. It has at its heart the exact opposites of the two tendencies which define This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 148 NEW LITERARY HISTORY Modernism. The aesthetics of Post-Modernism is militantly anti- psychological (if that word is taken in its usual meaning) and radically anti-mythical. It is about things, not people, as Robbe- Grillet points out when he says: All around us, defying our pack of animistic or domesticating adjectives, things are there. Their surface is smooth, clear, and intact, without false glamour, without transparency. [Let me interject-they are not sym- bolical, the forest is a forest, not a forest of symbols. But it is not, there- fore, less mysterious]. The whole of our literature has not yet managed even to begin to penetrate them, to alter their slightest curve.27 And for from wishing to deal with recurring patterns whose uni- versality will be emphasized, novelists in the post-modern period ingeniously-and sometimes, it must be admitted, rather strenuously- seek to avoid the familiar. Nathalie Saurraute writes: demands for universality With regard to the novel, are all the more familiar to the author who, being himself a reader, and often a very perceptive one, has also experi- enced them. The result is that when he starts to tell a story and says to his self he must . . . write down for the mocking eye of the reader 'The Marquise went out at five o.'clock,' he hesitates, he hasn't the heart, he simply can't bring himself to do it.28 Now, if, as such figures as Robbe-Grillet and Borges have been, you are interested in disestablishing the mythic and psychological tendencies of the tradition you are defining yourself against, what better way for doing so could recommend itself than that of exploiting what had already become the polar opposite of that tradition in its own time? Detective stories had always been recognized as escape literature. But escape from what? Among other things, escape from literature itself, as we emphasized above in the dichotomy between the detective story with its exterior simplicities and Modernism with its interior com- plexities. Thus, when after World War II Robbe-Grillet was search- ing for ways to overcome the literary tradition of the novel he so naturally turned to the detective story as a mode. What myth was to experimental fiction before World War II, detective fiction is to avant- garde prose after World War II. The possibilities for symbolic action and depth psychology which Homer provides for James Joyce are replaced in the later period by the ambiguous events the psychologically 27 "A Path for the Future of the Novel," in Maurice Nadeau, ed., The French Novel since the War, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1969) p. 185. 28 "The New Novel," in Nadeau, op. cit., p. 181. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 149 flat and therefore mysterious world which Holmes and Poirot make available to Robbe-Grillet and Borges. That is to say that Post-Modernism exploits detective stories by expanding and changing certain possibilities in them, just as Mod- ernism had modified the potentialities of myth.. There is a difference in the way that Homer and Joyce come at Ulysses, and there is also a difference in the way that Agatha Christie and Borges come at the detective story. Robbe-Grillet is quite explicit about this. In a 1956 essay on the nouveau roman he speaks of it in terms of an inverted detective story. He says: The exhibits described in a thriller . .. provide a fairly accurate illustra- tion of the situation. The various elements collected by the detectives- an object abandoned at the scene of the crime, a movement immobilized in a photograph, a phrase overheard by a witness-these would all seem at first sight to call for an explanation, to exist only as a function of their role in an affair which is beyond them. But now various hypotheses begin to be built: the examining magistrate tries to establish a logical and necessary connection between the things; you think everything is going to resolve itself into a trite collection of causes and effects . . . But the plot starts to thicken alarmingly, witnesses contradict one another, the suspect multiplies his alibis, new factors crop up which had previously been over- looked ... And you have to keep coming back to the recorded evidence: the exact position of a piece of furniture, the shape and frequency of a fingerprint, a word written in a message. The impression grows on you that nothing else is true. Whether they conceal or reveal a mystery these elements that defy all systems have only one serious, obvious quality-that of being there. And that is how it is with the world around us. We thought we had come to terms with it by giving it a meaning, and the whole art of the novel, in particular, seemed dedicated to this task. But that was only an illusory simplification and far from becoming clearer and nearer, all that was happening was that the world was gradually losing its life in the process. Since its reality consists above all in its presence, what we have to do now, then, is to build a literature which takes this into account.29 If Robbe-Grillet knew more about the history of detective fiction he would not have chosen the type of tale he does in fact adduce as a metaphor for his own method. He would rather have chosen as his example the four murder classics published by Dennis Wheatley and J. G. Links in the late 1930's. Although each story was remarkably intricate, the dossiers' particular originality lay in their presentation or construction; construction in the 29 Robbe-Grillet, op. cit., p. i88. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 150 NEW LITERARY HISTORY literal sense, for the dossiers contain the actual evidence of the murders, photographs of the victims and central characters, bits and pieces of material, cigarettes, pills and so on.30 In fact, very much the same sort of thing Robbe-Grillet has listed as evidence in his essay-and in his novel. The Wheatley-Links dossiers received a mixed reception. The Times reviewer wrote that if this were the start of a new fashion, The critics, it may be imagined, will be replaced by analysts-experts who, instead of hovering lengthily over literary merits will be able to pronounce with finality such verdicts as 'The hay in Mr. Blank's pastoral scenes is definitely best he has given us yet,' or, 'Miss Dash's picture of nursery life is marred by an unimaginative use of tapioca.' 31 Another critic made the same point with less hyperbole: ". .. the principal actors in the dossier are not [the characters in it], but the real cretonne, the detachable match end and the engaging twist of hair."32 The dossiers became increasingly complicated, until, in the fourth and last one, the reader had to remember the complete details of sixteen people and backgrounds, and then pick out the five or six key details. For example, a man has asthma and might therefore smoke an herbal cigarette: but to discover this the reader would have to take the butt ends and actually smoke them.33 The solution to the mystery was always found under a seal on the last page of the book. Now, with some important differences which must be kept in mind, it can be seen that these long forgotten toys provide an easily grasped metaphor for certain essential characteristics of recent experimental fiction. What the reviewer jokes about in the Wheatley dossiers has become a serious business in Robbe-Grillet: "experts . . . instead of hovering lengthily over literary merits" will in fact be constrained to examine the objects themselves; the principal actors have, in Robbe- Grillet ceased to be the characters, and have rather become the things of the world. Just as Wheatley and Links wished through their objects to create a greater reality, so does Robbe-Grillet, in his vastly subtler way wish to do so with his. But the basic difference between the British 30 Reg Gadney, "The Murder Dossiers of Dennis Wheatley and J. G. Links," The London Magazine, VIII (1969), 41. 31 Quoted by Gadney, op. cit., p. 46. 32 Ibid., p. 46. 33 Ibid., p. 49. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 151 murder mystery and the French new novel is the different sense each has of the operation plot performs. The solution to a novel like The Voyeur, for instance, is not to be found under a seal on its last page. Indeed, The Voyeur has no last page in the sense in which that term is normally used. No, the solution cannot be had by breaking a seal in a book-the solution must be found in the experience of the reader himself, as a brief examination of The Voyeur will show. We will not have time to discuss the manifold clues which the reader is tempted to gather, to put together in an orderly sequence, such as the at-first-seemingly-significant, recurring motifs of the figure eight, the newspaper clipping, the precise distance (20 feet) which a gull keeps between himself and Mathias, or the difference between gum- drops and caramels. But in order to see the trick which is contained in each of these booby-traps, we should examine at least one set of those parallels which teem in The Voyeur. There are three different movie posters which are described at the beginning, middle and end of the book. The first one looks like this: In front of the door a bulletin-board, supported from behind by two wooden uprights, offered the weekly program of the local movie house ... In the garishly colored advertisement, a colossal man dressed in Renais- sance clothes was clutching a young girl wearing a kind of long pale night- gown; the man was holding her wrists behind her back with one hand, and was strangling her with the other. The upper part of her body and her head were bent backward in her effort to escape her executioner, and her long blond hair hung down to the ground. The setting in the background represented a tremendous pillared bed with red covers.34 What are the significant points here? First, what kind of a plot does this poster call to mind? It is an absurd, theatrical situation, very much like that found in cheap historical novels or thrillers; colossal men, young girls in long pale nightgowns, a tremendous bed with the conventional red covers on it of conventional fictive passion. The hyperbole of the specific adjectives-colossal, tremendous-is subsumed by the "garish colors" of the whole thing. But notice also what is hap- pening: a young girl is being strangled, just as Mathias strangles Violet/Jacqueline. What we have here is the first part of a very com- plicated, serial joke, which is a key to the non-plot of The Voyeur. That is, in this scene, Robbe-Grillet sets up what he might have done, had he written a conventional murder novel. This first poster is a 34 Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, tr. Richard Howard (New York, 1966), P- 34. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 152 NEW LITERARY HISTORY metaphor for what would have been the traditional literary treatment of his subject-garish, hyperbolic, narrative. The second poster is a metaphor for the novel he actually writes, a metaphor for the structure of The Voyeur itself: The new advertisement represented a landscape. At least Mathias thought he could make out a moor dotted with clumps of bushes in its interlacing lines but something else must have been superimposed: here and there certain outlines or patches of color appeared which did not seem to be part of the original design. On the other hand they could not be said to constitute another drawing entirely; they appeared to have no relation to one another, and it was impossible to guess their intention. They succeeded, in any case, in so blurring the configurations of the moor that it was doubtful whether the poster represented a landscape at all . . . Underneath was spread in huge letters what must have been the name of the film: "Monsieur X on the Double Circuit." Not conforming to the trends of recent productions, this title-which was scarcely enticing, having little or no relation to anything human-provided remarkably little infor- mation about what type of film it described. Perhaps it was a detective story, or a thriller.35 First of all, this is a physical landscape roughly similar to the one in which the novel's crime is committed-the lonely, moorlike grazing ground where the girl tends her flock, the clumps of bushes under which Mathias forgets his three cigarette butts. But more importantly, there is a suggestion of two different posters, one on top of the other, in other words, a palimpsest, and remaining, therefore, still slightly visible under the new text. Robbe-Grillet says that this palimpsest effect of the two superimposed posters so blurs "the configurations of the moor that it was doubtful whether [they] represented a landscape at all." And indeed, it is not a landscape. Perhaps it was a detective story or a thriller. And of course it is, and we can tell from its title just which detective story it is: Monsieur X on the Double Circuit. Monsieur X is, of course, Mathias, who is on several double circuits, each of which is marked by the double circuit of a figure eight. He is on a double circuit from mainland to island, from present to his past, from the village to the out- lying cottages by the sea and back again, etc. But Mathias' tale is not just a detective story. This title, as Robbe-Grillet says, does not con- form "to the trends of recent productions, [it] was scarcely enticing, having little or no relation to anything human." What better descrip- tion of The Voyeur? It is about things, not humans, and it certainly does not conform to recent productions by other, more traditional writers. And it is non-conventional in a specific way, specifically 35 Ibid., p. 143- This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 153 suggested by the double track of the palimpsest metaphor: it is a new text, a new kind of plot, written over the face of the old detective story, whose traditional elements still are legible underneath the new message. The third poster comes up very near the end of the book: On the other side of the monument he notices that the bulletin-board is covered with a completely white sheet of paper pasted on the surface of the wood. At this moment the garagemen comes out of his tobacco shop carrying a little bottle and a fine brush. Mathias asks him what happened to the sign that was up the day before: it wasn't the right one, the garage- man answers, for the film they had sent along with it; the distributor had made an error in the shipment. He would have to announce next Sunday's program by a hand-made ink inscription. Mathias leaves the man already busy with his task firmly tracing a large letter 0.36 The former poster was the wrong one-its suggestion of clashing messages was adequate to the method of the novel, but not to its telos. That is, the palimpsest of old and new detective fiction does not, in itself, indicate the specific difference between the two levels. That is given to us here: the new metaphysical detective story finally obliter- ates the traces of the old which underlie it. It is non-teleological, is not concerned to have a neat ending in which all the questions are answered, and which can therefore be forgotten. No, the new story is purged of such linear teleology, it is not, like the old posters, mass produced, printed in the sense other books are. It is rather a fresh sheet of paper, on which the reader, as in our example, must hand letter his own answers. That is the meaning of the new title here: it is not yet written out, not yet completed. The double cycle has been broken, the bottom half of the figure eight has been stripped away to reveal the letter 0, the only letter which also may be a cipher-zero. This zero works in several ways: it is a clue to the author's polemical intention in that it realizes the metaphor contained in the anti-lit- erary manifesto of Robbe-Grillet's friend Roland Barthes, Le digrd zdro de l'dcriture (1953). But more to the point, it represents the real end of the novel: its telos is the lack of telos, its plot consists in the calculated absence of plot. It is not a story-it is a process; the reader, if he is to experience the book, must do what detectives do, must turn it into a series of objects, must then collate all the clues which Robbe-Grillet has provided. But all these clues end-when put together -in zero, or a circle, the line which has no end. It is not a story-it is not about Mathias or a little girl-it is not about fictive people. It is about--or rather-it is a real process. It is a kind of calisthenics of 36 Ibid., p. 214. This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 154 NEW LITERARY HISTORY perception. In absorbing the book, the reader exercises the muscles which control his inner, "private," eye. Robbe-Grillet was not the first to subvert the cliches of detective fiction in the service of a programmatic attempt to achieve less "lit- erary" plots. He had been preceeded in this direction by Nabokov and Borges. Patricia Merivale has pointed out that both men exploit for their own thematic purposes, all the narrative tricks and devices of the Gothic fantasy writers of the last two centuries, and they blend mannerism and Gothicism together in their single most important parodic pattern, the metaphysical detective story...37 Five of Nabokov's major fictions end in fatal gunshots, and several of his most important protagonists, such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955) or Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962), are cosmic detectives, who wish to solve the crime of their own existence. Borges, in particular, is a great reader of detective stories: in 1951 he published (in Spanish) an anthology which included classical representatives of the genre by Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and G. K. Chesterton and others.38 And he himself writes at least two kinds of detective stories: the first of which is fairly conventional, at least when compared to the rest of his work; examples of this type would be the tales collected under the title Six Problems for Indio Parodi (1942). His other experiments with the form are probably the purest example of the metaphysical detective story. It is this tendency he has also in common with Robbe-Grillet, a point made several times by students of both, who usually compare The Erasers (1953) with Borges' short story Death and the Compass.39 The first is the story 37 "The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII (1967), 295. While recognizing as much, and even pointing to parallels in Robbe-Grillet, Miss Merivale does not directly engage the problem of why these men should choose precisely the detective story as a point of departure. Her concern is the subject of her title, of course; but even so, in her otherwise admirable study, she establishes a grammar, but not a semantics, for the parody in both Nabokov and Borges. 38 Chesterton is of particular interest here. English and American audiences have long been baffled by the extravagant praise Borges bestows on such otherwise un- canonical authors as Robert Louis Stevenson or the author of The Man Who Was Thursday. But it should be remembered that Howard Haycraft coined the phrase (as far as can be determined) "metaphysical detective story" in 1941 (Murder for Pleasure, p. 78) to describe Chesterton's unique contribution to the genre. 39 As in Merivale, op. cit., pp. 296-297. Another twist on the relationship between detective and criminal is found in a 1936 story of the Polish master, Witold Gom- browicz ("Premeditated Crime"). An old man has died, apparently of natural causes, yet the detective convinces the dead man's son that he (the son) has murdered his father. There are no clues, so the son obligingly chokes the corpse, leaving fingerprints, which "together with the murderer's clear confession at the trial, were finally considered as adequate legal basis." This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHODUNIT AND OTHER QUESTIONS 155 of a detective who knows he must be at a certain place at a certain time in order to catch the criminal, but when he shows up he himself commits the murder. The Borges tale uses the same twist to achieve the opposite effect: when the detective works out where the next in a series of murders must occur, he shows up only to become the victim. We have seen how two leading Post-Modernists play with the con- ventions of the detective story, mining the genre for plots and surprises. Just as earlier Mann had depended on his readers' knowledge of the Faust legend, and therefore could achieve certain effects by changing the familiar story in crucial ways, so Robbe-Grillet and Borges depend on the audience's familiarity with the conventions of the detective story to provide the subtext they may then play with by defeating expec- tations. The most common expectation, based on reading classical detective stories, which Post-Modernism defeats is that of syllogistic order. Like Poe, Robbe-Grillet and Borges have a deep sense of the chaos of the world, but unlike Poe, they cannot assuage that sense by turning to the mechanical certainty, the hyper-logic of the classical detective story. Post-Modernists use as a foil the assumption of detective fiction that the mind can solve all: by twisting the details just the opposite becomes the case. Take as an example Borges' story The Garden of Forking Paths. Its whole effect depends on the clash between two levels, one a disturbing philosophical proposition about a temporal, instead of a spatial, labyrinth, the other a frame story, a kind of narra- tive sandwich which has all the cliches of detective (and certain of spy) fiction. The ending is very well made, with a kind of O. Henry- like twist-but this tying up of loose ends at the conclusion has the opposite effect from that which obtains, say, in a Sherlock Holmes story. The neatness of the ending, its pat explanation, far from having the reassuring effect of demonstrating the mind's capacity to order the world in the Borges tale, looks shaky, hollow; its logic is unconvincing in the face of the complexity which has preceded it. Thus the metaphysical detective story does not have the narcotizing effect of its progenitor; instead of familiarity, it gives strangeness, a strangeness which more often than not is the result of jumbling the well known patterns of classical detective stories. Instead of reassur- ing, they disturb. They are not an escape, but an attack. By exploiting the conventions of the detective story such men as Borges and Robbe- Grillet have fought against the Modernist attempt to fill the void of the world with rediscovered mythical symbols. Rather, they dramatize the void. If, in the detective story, death must be solved, in the new metaphysical detective story it is life which must be solved. And in this attack on the reader lies all the difference between art This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 156 NEW LITERARY HISTORY and kitsch. I hope our tentative historical model has suggested at least one way in which the kaleidiscope of popular and high culture con- stantly rearrange their patterns of relationship to each other. In art there is always the potential for reduction to kitsch, especially in an age in which we possess the technology to print the Mona Lisa on bath towels. That is unfortunate, but not the cause for alarm it is so often felt to be. If we really believe in culture, we should have faith in its capacity to survive even such indignities. And one of the ways that art does survive is by going on the counter attack, exploiting kitsch for new effects of which kitsch in its complacency, its urge to reassure was itself unaware. That is the lesson of the metaphysical detective story in our own time. It sees the potential for real violence-violence to our flabby habits of perception-in the phoney violence of the detective story. And out of it Post-Modernism contrives to perform the tra- ditional function of all art, which Wallace Stevens has defined as "the violence from within which protects us from the violence without." YALE UNIVERSITY This content downloaded from 146.50.98.28 on Sun, 2 Nov 2014 08:01:53 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions