I begin with Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism, placing the “detective story” among his “Theory of Modes”:
The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him. The detective story begins in the Sherlock Holmes period as an intensification of low mimetic, in the sharpening of attention to details that makes the dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living leap into mysterious and fateful significance. But as we move further away from this we move toward a ritual drama around a corpse in which a wavering finger of social condemnation passes over a group of “suspects” and finally settles on one. The sense of a victim chosen by lot is very strong, for the case against him is only plausibly manipulated.
Here, Frye at first seems to suggest that the origins of the detective story as we encounter it in literary history are alienated from its authentic origins in prehistory—and that only later did the story regress, as it were, to its primal state: a “ritual drama around a corpse,” giving rise to the search for a scapegoat. (The limited cast of suspects here standing in for, evoking, the small tribal community.) Yet the two phases of the detective story share a common element, yielding what might be called a double arbitrariness: arbitrariness of details—those “dullest and most neglected trivia of daily living,” apparently the stuff of Roland Barthes’ later “reality effect”—and the arbitrariness of guilt. In both the clue and the identified culprit, we have a sense of randomness redeemed—made meaningful—by guilt.
I will set aside, for the moment, Frye’s invocation of the pharmakos, or scapegoat, a notion that has received much attention in recent years, particularly due to a recent internet-fueled revival of interest in the work of René Girard. My immediate concern is with his remark on the “dull and neglected trivia of daily living”—a line whose echoes I once traced to the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, and through him, to a desultory late novel by the Irish novelist John Banville, and which thus in its own way serves as a clue—in this case, to Jameson’s early absorption by Frye, one his more attractive qualities, the more charmingly displayed in that, here at least, the disciple declines to acknowledge it.
Here is Jameson on Raymond Chandler—making him sound like a prose Edward Hopper:
In much the same way, a case can be made for Chandler as a painter of American life…. Take for example some perfectly insignificant daily experience such as the encounter of two people in the lobby of an apartment building. I find my neighbor unlocking his mailbox; I have never seen him before, we glance at each other briefly, his back is turned as he struggles with the larger magazines inside. Such an instance expresses in its fragmentary quality a profound truth about American life, in its perception of the stained carpets, the sand-filled spittoons, the poorly shutting glass doors, all testifying to the shabby anonymity of a meeting-place between the luxurious private lives that stand side by side like closed monads behind the doors of the private apartments: a dreariness of waiting rooms and public bus stations, of the neglected places of collective life that fill up the interstices between the privileged compartments of middle class living.
“The neglected places of … living”: the echo of Frye is distinct—it lights up like a clue—albeit obfuscated by what here, more than usual, feels like a cryptic moralistic cast of Jameson’s notionally “political” imagination. (This is present in the ironical invocation of a “collective life” that has itself somehow fallen into desuetude, that is here present in its degraded, neglected form—yet holding forth, as it were, the prospect of its own purported redemption, could only the full import of such terms as “private,” “privileged,” and “middle class” be grasped. Does the moralism inhere in the predictability? The sense of something rote gives these lines a maudlin cast…)
In any case, of “such a perception,” Jameson writes,
its very essence is to be inessential. For this reason it eludes the registering apparatus of great literature: make of it some Joycean epiphany and the reader is obliged to take this moment as the center of his world, as something directly infused with symbolic meaning; and at once the most fragile and precious quality of the perception is irrevocably damaged, its slightness is lost, it can no longer be half-glimpsed, half-disregarded—the meaningless is arbitrarily given meaning.
Or, as we might say, the meaningless has “a wavering finger” pass over before, finally, settling on it.
And yet… Jameson’s account of the “inessential” perception of “neglected places” presumes a kind of attention, or rather inattention, that the practiced reader of crime novels is unlikely to bring to them. Even the opening, apparently inconsequential scenes of a crime novel or crime movie are apt to evoke a heightened, essentially paranoid awareness. Jameson’s portrayal of the meaningless encounter by the mailboxes of the apartment building is plausible only insofar as the characters do not know they are in a detective novel. For the characters who know they are, for the readers who encounter them, objects can only belatedly be restored, or exonerated into, an innocence that was not theirs to begin with.
A crime scene is a Dramatis Personae of objects. Only when these have been exonerated—found to be red herrings—do they regain, or, rather, acquire, their innocence, their status as the insignificant real. First comes the ordeal. Presumed guilty, they can only later be made innocent—and perhaps never absolutely. Indictments adhere. Pressing between two covers amounts to a perp walk. Exoneration is a dialectic: it “sublates” but does not erase. (All the more reason why we come to feel, in many crime fictions, that the ultimate mark of Cain is that of having been born at all. Individuality—the one indelible stain.)
It might be noted that the same process of exoneration is followed by Barthes himself in his development of the concept of the insignificant detail—the line of his argument mirror the process whereby, so to speak, realism is liberated from meaning.
Observe that—and it is inevitable that it should be so—the notion of the “reality effect” is arrived at, is only secondarily derived, from an initial presupposition of meaningfulness, significance, and is only arrived at after the possibilities of significance have been (apparently, and, it will turn out, only provisionally, exhausted):
It would seem, however, that if analysis seeks to be exhaustive (and what would any method be worth which did not account for the totality of its object, i.e., in this case, of the entire surface of the narrative fabric?), if it seeks to encompass the absolute detail, the indivisible unit, the fugitive transition, in order to assign them a place in the structure, it inevitably encounters notations which on function (not even the most indirect) can justify: such notations are scandalous (from the point of view of structure), or, what is even more disturbing, they seem to correspond to a kind of narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many “futile” details and thereby increasing the cost of narrative information. For if—
and here we see the process of elimination, as the precisely non-wavering finger, the reader’s manicula trawling the text like braille—
in Flaubert’s description, it is just possible to see in the notation of the piano an indication of its owner’s bourgeois standing and in that of the cartons a sign of disorder and a kind of lapse in status likely to connote the atmosphere of the Aubain household, no purpose seems to justify reference to the barometer, an object neither incongruous nor significant, and therefore not participating, at first glance, in the order of the notable; and in Michelet’s sentence, we have the same difficulty in accounting structurally for all the details…
Excess, you might say, never escapes being measured by the standard of necessity.
In any event, the objects do not remain insignificant for long. Momentarily released from the background assumption of meaningfulness, they swiftly acquire a new one, signifying their own insignificance. Hence what Barthes calls “the referential illusion”:
The truth of this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist speech-act as a signified of denotation, the “real” returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do—without saying so—is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is in the category of the real (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of the unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.
Though perhaps the renewed sense of the contingency of the “contents”—why this one and not that one—of this “category does, in its indirect way, restore to them that “insignificance” that Jameson initially claimed for them. They are the decoys, the alternates, the understudies in the police lineup—told to go home.
The identification of guilt is an act of predication, of not-quite tautology. This man is that man—the killer.
It is preceded by specification, of both the suspect and the objects pointing to him. The killer, the god made manifest, comes preceded by attendant spirits, by minor divinities: the clues.
I have previously noted the use of definite articles in discussions of crime scenes: how a mere hillock, some pointless patch of grass—what one might, if put to it (though who would ever be put to it), call “a grassy knoll”—becomes the grassy knoll. The object or feature of landscape, in becoming a prop or stage dressing, describes a trajectory akin to that which takes us from the first to the final line of Geoffrey Hill’s book-length poem, The Triumph of Love: “Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp”; “Sun-blazed, over Romsley, the livid rain-scarp.” (Is it coincidence that the second section of that poem evokes crime: “Guilts were incurred in that place, now I am convinced: / self-molestation of the child-soul, would that be it?” The guilts are those of emergent sexuality—if not the only, then perhaps the more salient connected with mere existing?)
The board game merely formalizes the relationship between the fetishized object and repetition, repeatability, embodied in the definite article: Professor Plum in The Library with The Lead Pipe.