Over on twitter the other day Nate Holdren asked that one of “the smart literary marxists should write as simple of a book as they can for the rest of us about what we should think of when we watch cop shows or read crime books.” Happily there are quite a lot of smart literary Marxists types but until they get round to this, Nate’s question prompted me to go back to some work on Ernst Bloch — more on that in a moment.
In contemporary Marxist cultural criticism, probably the most famous essay on crime fiction is Jameson’s “Realism and Utopia in The Wire” (2010). Jameson makes the point that the crime story allows for recognition — the struggle between the dealers and the cops confers to each group “something like an institutional status…and such groups are accorded objective social reality.” The wider point is that (and this is a classic Jameson move) this gives us an insight into a social totality. And this is important, because in The Wire, really the whole point of the show is that the cops fundamentally don’t understand the drug business because they initially grasp it as something that functions on the level of the streets (mostly by corner kids who aren’t old enough to be prosecuted). Really, The Wire is not about individuals — it is about social blocs (expressed through social relationships) that intersect in a variety of ways that are fundamental transformative of a whole intersection of political and economic issues.Jameson turns his attention to the Utopian traces within the show. For example, Stringer Bell trying to eliminate internecine gang violence as an unnecessary cost to business, the legalization of drugs in Hamsterdam, Frank Sabotka trying to revive the Baltimore docks, or Pryzbylewski getting his students away from the useless state and federal education policies. All of these individual actions, or plot beats are not simply character choices, they are, as Jameson closes his essay, “the Utopian future that here and there breaks through, before reality and the present again close it down.”
This brings up the first key point and a good thesis for why Marxist types should be interested in crime fiction — namely, crime is about the wider social world. Ernst Bloch, in his essay “A Philosophical Approach to the Detective Novel” gives some interesting contrast to Jameson’s essay. Bloch takes a far longer historical view, and begins with a interesting point, Namely, one cannot have detective fiction as we would recognise it today without evidentiary standards. As he puts it,
Prior to the middle of the eighteenth century there were absolutely no evidentiary trials, at least none that were deliberate. Only several eyewitnesses and above all the confession, which was called the regina probationis, could sustain a conviction – nothing else. Since it was seldom that enough witnesses were available, torture was instituted to elicit the regina probationis, and its painful question was the only refined one in Charles V’s gallows justice. The result was that the accused was put off his guard through pain and made to say things – a torn web of lies at the cost of equally torn limbs – that no one but the perpetrator and the judge could know. The effect was unthinkable atrocity, the worthless extortion of guilt, against which the Enlightenment rebelled for both humane and logical reasons
Ernst Bloch, A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel
We could distinguish between two types in crime fiction even up to the modern day. One would be the evidentiary struggle — mediated increasingly through scientific or forensic technique and endlessly repeatable as the police procedural. Crime in this type is solved through the reduction of individual action to quantitative distinctions, as all crime leaves behind some trace cellular residue (think the enormously popular CSI franchise).
Second, would be the detective who focuses on confession still — though without the need for torture. A paradigmatic example in modern media is Columbo, played by the iconic Peter Falk. From the outset he already knows who has committed the crime and his process of investigation is not primarily to assemble evidence but to partner with the guilty person and lead them inexorably to their own confession. Crime in this type is generally seen as a symptom of a far wider set of problem, expressed as what that crime represents (I don’t think it is coincidence that the cases Columbo investigates happen among the wealthy lesuire class of the USA).
Obviously there are always admixtures of these two types Columbo might find a stray cigarette butt, and the team in CSI may well need a detective to extract a confession, but I do think these are worthwhile distinctions and suggest a whole range of wider discourses about the nature of crime, the social field in which it is investigated and the role, function and methods of detection. As I’ve argued elsewhere, post 9/11 American crime procedurals are reflective of a basically intensely paranoid cultural moment, running head first into reactionary fantasies and a desire for a perfected society of control.
Bloch puts the historical trajectory like this:
Holmes, fin de siècle, utilizes the scientific-inductive method; he can tell from the mud on the soles of his visitors from which part of London they hail; he differentiates between all kinds of tobacco ashes, and chemistry is his favorite science. Agatha Christie’s character Hercule Poirot, on the other hand, a product of less rational times, no longer stakes his “grey little cells” on the inductive card, but instead intuits the totality of the case in accordance with the increasingly irrational modes of thinking characteristic of late bourgeois society. Thus Bergson and totality theory have triumphed over J. S. Mill and the mere aggregation of particulars in the realm of the detective novel as well.
Bloch makes the point that this shift from Holmes to Poirot is part of a broader historical shift — an intensification and acceleration of alienation from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
If anything, alienation itself has increased, an alienation that holds people in opposition to themselves, their fellow humans, and the world they have created, and the concomitant chaotic insecurity of life (compared with the relative security of the nineteenth century) has added general mistrust to the duplicity. Anything can now be expected from anybody, consistent with the economy of exchange that now applies to faces as well and that, as in an Alfred Hichcock horror film, does not even know the direction from which the blow will come.
Thus, for Bloch literary detection is not just about the extraction of confession or the assembling of evidence but is specifically about unmasking. Here, crime fiction finds its correlation in the theatre of Ibsen and the analysis of Freud — neither of which can be classified in a straightforward sense as detective fiction but are “structures of detection sui generis of the dramatic and analytical variety.” There are, for Bloch, two kinds of unmasking worth highlighting: one, the uncovering of “subjectively false consciousness” — this is private and personal and would be that which is done on the analyst’s couch. Secondly, there is “objectively false consciousness” or, in other words, “the economic interpretation of history.” As Bloch writes:
For Marx, the true secret history of Rome is that of private property, and a radical detective inclination claims that all ideologies are reflections of their respective relations of production – indeed (and that would certainly be the test of the hypothesis), that the ideologies develop entirely genetically from them. The illuminating power of this uncovering, discovering view of history is evident even if every superstructure cannot actually be derived from the infrastructure; a reciprocity exists, rather, with the ideologies contributing, nay, producing their own surplus. It is precisely for this reason that such detection techniques, when correctly understood and applied, have the effect of nitric acid in the testing sense: they dissolve false gold, rendering that which remains of the genuine element in formerly progressive times unmistakably recognizable
(Once again we arrive back at the Utopian aspect in the detective fiction that Jameson recognises in The Wire). On a literary level, Bloch is drawn to the fact that there is a tradition in which the detective story starts in a kind of metaphoric darkness, with something that is being withheld and not depicted. The crime has always-already occurred and the curtain rises with a body already present. This darkness is what has to be put right in the course of investigation but it is through the process of investigation that we actually uncover the true extent of just how bad things truly are. For Bloch this is what makes the detective story from Poe onward fundamentally indebted to the far older story of Oedpius
One recalls the resulting plague inflicted upon Thebes and the interpretation of the misdeed after it occurred by the Oracle at Delphi. One recalls as well Oedipus’ increasingly pressing and urgent investigations carried out in the interest of his people and his own security from the murderer, yet thwarted by the most confounded obstacle. The hunter who is himself the prey and fails in this quest of self plies his monstrous trade until he belatedly recognizes the truth and does penitence for the perpetration of crimes in which he participates, neither consciously nor morally, but with a highly classical and a highly modern ego-identity. Multifariously disguised, the theme of Oedipus, this primordial detective theme per se, continued to have an effect, always criminalistic to be sure, and with the hidden antecedent.
Oedipus functions as the criminological knot on which the detective as archetype develops, taken in a variety of directions but probably reaching a particular high point with J.J Gittes in Chinatown (1974) when even detection itself is revealed to be so powerless as unable to make even the smallest gesture toward restitution. Yet Bloch goes further still, not content with just a literary genealogy that goes back to Oedipus and through contemporary alienation. Rather, he argues that even in philosophy, “the presupposition is that a veiled misdeed precedes the creation of the world itself” Here he marshals a whole host of other philosophers, particularly Franz Baader and the later works of Schelling as his “architects of gloom.” As Schelling puts it in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) “After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world as we now see it is law, order and form; yet lawlessness always lurks at its foundations, as if it could once again break through, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were at the origin but rather, that an original chaos was brought to order. . . . Without this antecedent darkness, there is no creational reality; gloom is its necessary heritage”
Bloch makes a fare grander and more sweeping set of philosophical claims than Jameson — crime is not just the subjective appearance of the functioning of a wider social totality but the cultural expression of a near universal philosophical problem, what he would call in other writings the darkness of the lived moment, a revelation of our own fundamental inability to understand who or what we are. In a sense the detective story is not just about the cooperation of ideology (though it most certainly is that) but rather a haunting reminder that we are strangers to ourselves. No Oedpius has yet answered the Sphinx’s riddle, says Bloch and as he asks his reader, “is the reader of these mysteries not caught in the darkness of his undisclosed momentary being continually renewing itself?”
In the context of the enormously popular wave of British TV police procedurals is this not precisely Bloch’s point? A detective comes to a rural community, one that appears idyllic (how many people watch these shows for the scenery, I wonder?) The crime is the occluded darkness that precipitates and starts the action. The point is not to solve the crime per se, rather the narrative structure is designed to be a mechanism of unmasking. The community is not outside of the crimes but shown to be so deeply enmeshed within it that even the settings become suspect somehow, its beauty concealing a far darker social structures. Detective fiction in its mass form is not so much about the relationships of individuals but the ways in which we are, at core, strangers to ourselves and caught up in the violent operations of ideological and structural forces — all the detective serves to do, is to reveal that truth and leave us to work out what comes next. Structurally, of course, it’s form tends towards closure, leaving the community with nothing but more secrets and more unspoken darkness.
thelitcritguy 