CRIME AND DETECTION IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

Edited by

Martina Vránová

Zénó Vernyik

Dávid Levente Palatinus

CRIME AND DETECTION IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

Edited by

Martina Vránová

Zénó Vernyik

Dávid Levente Palatinus

cc 2018 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

General editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

cc Martina Vránová, Zénó Vernyik, and Dávid Levente Palatinus

ISBN: 978-615-5423-53-6 (.mobi); 978-615-5423-52-9 (.epub);

978-615-5423-51-2 (PoD)

The manuscript was reviewed by Maurizio Ascari and Bohumil Fořt

Cover image: Dávid Levente Palatinus

Book design: Zoltán Dragon

AMERICANA eBooks is a division of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies,

University of Szeged, Hungary.

http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu

This book is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 – Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licene. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.hu

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Crime and Detection in Contemporary Culture

Martina Vránová, Zénó Vernyik and Dávid Levente Palatinus

PART I.

CRIME AND DETECTION IN LITERATURE

“But Here, in Edinburgh! It’s Unthinkable.” Bringing the Evil to the Doorstep in Ian Rankin’s Knots & Crosses

Markéta Gregorová

Accurate or Else?: Representations of the Northern Irish Conflict in the Troubles Thrillers—Danny Morrison’s The Wrong Man and Stuart Neville’s The Twelve

Michaela Marková

The Vision of Proliferating Crime in Iain Banks’s Fiction

Martina Vránová

Detection in the Anglo-American Campus Novel: A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus

Petr Anténe

Shadows of the Fantastic over Baker Street: Counterfictionality in Recent Rewritings of the Sherlock Holmes Saga

Sándor Klapcsik

PART II.

CRIME AND DETECTION BEYOND LITERATURE

Displaced Detection: Surveillance and Algorithmic Logic as a New Model of  the Crime Calculus

Zoltán Dragon

Mediating the Corpse: CSI and the  Affective Screen

Dávid Levente Palatinus

“Through a Glass, Darkly”: The (Im)possibility of Detection in The Black Mirror

Zénó Vernyik

Popular Crime and Populist Investigation: The CSI Franchise and Multi-Media Participation

Elke Weissmann

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION

CRIME AND DETECTION IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

MARTINA VRÁNOVÁ, ZÉNÓ VERNYIK

AND DÁVID LEVENTE PALATINUS

Crime fiction was for a long time popularly and persistently conceived as a niche genre, self-contained, closed, and formulaic, “both self-referential, and (albeit sometimes mockingly) self-reverential […] It simply couldn’t function unless its writers and readers had at least some knowledge about the [genre] in which they participate, the more the better” (Gelder 2004, 55). Being thus characterized, it was relegated to a second-class status, that of a mere “sub-genre of fiction, similar, for example, to romantic fiction, a sub-genre that is perhaps interesting but not truly significant in the same sense as conventional fiction” (Evans 2009, 1).

Yet, even a superficial look at contemporary cultural production shows that crime fiction and detective fiction have a pervasive presence in our historic moment. It has got an extremely wide and solid fan base, it has always been around and its popularity and centrality in the cultural domain since the 18th century has been amply demonstrated in the literature (cf. Ginzburg 1989, Marcus 2003, Scaggs 2005, Ascari 2007, Rzepka 2010, Nicol et al. 2011). Our purpose here is therefore to reposition this second-class status, and to direct attention to the ways in which it has always been a peculiar and key mode of channelling cultural perceptions of, and imaginaries about, violence, transgression, sublimity, anxieties – and all instances of social pathology as well as the intricate relation between politics and power. Whilst continuing to be formulaic, especially in its recent manifestations both in literary fiction and across converging media, it has become more and more conducive to (generic) subversion, transgression and hybridization. It is the ability to adapt and to constantly reinvent itself, its ubiquity and its reliance on participation that makes crime fiction, as a genre as well as a mode, so powerful and capable of mobilizing audiences more than any other form of genre fiction.

In fact, this strong presence is apparent in at least two senses. In the first, crime and detection have left the status of a niche genre behind, having been embraced by mainstream, serious fiction. Thus, “far from being a somewhat sleazy black-sheep cousin belatedly admitted to the house of fiction by a side door, the crime story has some claim to have driven the main structural transformations of narrative for (at least) the last half-century” (Priestman 2003, 6), and as such, “[s]ince 1945 crime fiction has become one of the principal forms of prose in the UK and the US, as well as many other European countries and Japan” (Cuddon et al. 2013). In fact, it has become so much a staple of “serious” literary fiction that

[s]ome of the most important authors of literary fiction in the post-war period, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon or Italo Calvino, have drawn at some point on crime-fiction conventions, as have many of the most fêted examples of serious fiction in recent years – for example, by Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Iain McEwan. (Nicol, Pulham and McNulty 2011, 4)

In the second sense, crime and detection have become a pervasive influence in that they not only surpassed genre boundaries, but also those of media. “The enduring popularity of literary crime genres is paralleled by those in the cinema: vigilante films, heist movies, spy thrillers, serial killer films, and so on. […] Watching imaginary crime is as much a staple of our cultural diet as stories of love and courtship” (Nicol, Pulham and McNulty 2011, 1-2). Similarly, the genre’s “mass mediation traverses comic strips, crime comics, and graphic novels” (Rzepka 2010, 7), and “we find many […] [computer] games that use a detective theme or story” (Veugen 2011, 73), and this list is by no means complete.

In fact, crime’s hold on the public imagination is not restricted to fiction either, whatever the medium. “Crime is one of the central concerns of western societies, sometimes through a dramatic and sensational presence in the media, sometimes as a mundane part of twenty-first century life, but always a topic that excites attention and engages the attention of readers or viewers” (Evans 2009, 1). Crime has also long been established as an area of research in converging areas of study, such as history, literature, culture, or politics, as a mode which successfully channels a number of social anxieties and ethical dilemmas both historically and about our present historic time when our sense of security has become eroded in relation to our identities (Palatinus 2017).

Thus, as crime and detection have grown beyond a literary genre to constitute a mode and a style that has a spectral presence in the collective cultural consciousness (Palatinus 2014), the goal of this volume is to inspect their representations and figurations across various converging media. This body of essays does not only investigate representations of the detective, the criminal and the victim from the point of view of psychology or social criticism, but also the ways crime, and the pertaining critical practice both on social and academic levels, has become an unavoidable commodity.

Although all papers in this volume are interdisciplinary in terms of the questions they pose or attempt to answer, for practical reasons they were divided into two sections based on which area is accentuated in them.  As could be expected, literature is an abundant source of criminals and criminologists, thus the first section is dedicated to crime and detection in literature. The second part, then, deals with crime’s representation in other media, be it film, television series, computer games, digital interfaces or fan groups.

This division is, nevertheless, purely formal, as a whole range of overarching concerns and topics will show. The most recurring issue that the contributors attempt to tackle is the question of genre, which, in itself, proves that detective or crime fiction assumes manifold forms. Markéta Gregorová elevates the genre of tartan noir to a specifically Scottish genre of detective fiction, manifesting a duality of character. Similarly, Michaela Marková argues for the genre of thriller to be a fitting form for the portrayal of the Northern Irish conflict. Petr Anténe focuses on the late 20th century development of the campus novel, inspecting its tendency to appropriate elements from other genres, crime fiction included. Sándor Klapcsik discusses a particular merge of Holmesian adaptations with the fantastic, and Martina Vránová, too, contemplates the elasticity of the genre of detective and crime fiction. Zoltán Dragon’s essay, by tackling changes in the way detection is changing both in crime series and in the real world, is also inevitably discussing what kind of changes this brings to the genre of the detective story, both in terms of its plot and in terms of the role of the protagonist. While Dávid Levente Palatinus’s paper primarily focuses on the aesthetics and visual language of forensic crime series through the example of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, it also discusses the question of genre in that it enumerates typical and constitutive changes to the classical crime narrative (in terms of focus, methods of detection, the role of the protagonist). It further contributes to the issue of genre through its discussion of forensic crime stories’ resemblance to and borrowing from other voyeuristic genres, including pornography. Zénó Vernyik’s essay, however, is more intimately linked to the question of genre in that it analyzes the computer game genre of the point-and-click adventure in relation to the literary genre of the detective story and its postmodern embodiment, the metaphysical detective story, in order to probe the extent to which computer games as a medium can be considered narrative in character. Finally, Elke Weissmann’s text, another one discussing crime’s representation in a computer game, tackles both crime narrative’s peculiar combination with the game genre of the treasure hunt, as well as hints on CSI’s indebtedness to the horror genre, during her discussion of forms and limitations of audience participation in CSI: Crime City.

Another frequently repeated issue in the volume is the connection of crime to social and political structures and institutions. Interestingly enough, Gregorová, Marková, as well as Vránová view crime as a very slippery concept having a dual character. Gregorová in her study of Rankin's fiction concludes that crime is a hidden, yet defining, character of Edinburgh and its inhabitants. Marková in her inspection of the Troubles thrillers presents crime as a political tool of either the establishment or of the fight of the underprivileged. Vránová, in her analysis of Banks’s novels, claims that crime may at first be a tempting tool of social and political reform, yet it will necessarily turn against everybody involved – the self-appointed vigilantes, their victims and the passive bystanders. All of these three contributors also see the role of a writer of such novels in raising public awareness and being socially and politically engaged.

The topic of crime’s social and political aspects also figures in the discussions of the non-literary chapters, although differently. Zoltán Dragon discusses how the switch from a classical régime of surveillance to the analysis of big data and digital footprints changes not only the detection of crime and its fictional representation, but also everyday life and our perception and experience of criminality. Dávid Levente Palatinus’s paper is devoted to the manifold social function of the dissection of the human body and its visual representation as spectacle, entertainment and enjoyment, while Elke Weissmann discusses the community building functions of crime narratives both as television series and as mini-games on social networks.

Many contributions share an expressly theoretical focus. Petr Anténe ventures into likening detection to academic research, Markéta Gregorová’s article tackles the spatial aspects of crime, while Sándor Klapcsik’s contribution revolves around the issues of adaptation and intertextuality. Zoltán Dragon’s text posits dataveillance and algorithmic logic as central to a new form of solving crime both on and off screen, Zénó Vernyik discusses the role narratives can play in the media of computer games, while Elke Weissmann tackles populism and the formation of participatory communities, as well as the freedom and limits to participation they can offer.

Thus, as the above paragraphs have shown, the present volume is more than a collection of loosely related chapters on crime and detection. It is both a venture in showing the centrality of the representation of crime in modern culture, as well as a heavily structured text focusing on issues of genre, social and political aspects of the culture of crime, and media-specific problems of its representation.

Works Cited

Ascari, Maurizio. 2007. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction. Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. London: Palgrave.

Cuddon, John Anthony Bowden, et al. 2013. “Crime Fiction.” In A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Evans, Mary. 2009. The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World. London: Continuum.

Gelder, Ken. 2004. Popular Fiction: The Logic and Practices of a Literary Field. London: Routledge.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Clues Myths and the Historical Method, Trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltomire: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marcus, Laura. 2003. “Detection and Literary Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, 245-268. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Nicol, Brian, Patricia Pulham, and Eugene McNulty. 2011. “Introduction: Crime Culture and Modernity.” In Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film, edited by Brian Nicol, Patricia Pulham, and Eugene McNulty, 1–12.  London: Continuum.

Palatinus, David L. 2017. “Humans, Machines and the Screen of the Anthropocene.“ Americana E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 13 (2). http://americanaejournal.hu/vol13no2/palatinus

_____. 2014. “The Spectres of Crime: Haunting Iconographies on / of the

Screen.“ CSTOnline June. https://cstonline.net/the-spectres-of-crime-haunting-iconographies-onof-the-screen-by-david-levente-palatinus/

Priestman, Martin. 2003. “Introduction: Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, 1–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rzepka, Charles J. 2010. “Introduction: What Is Crime Fiction?” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 1–10. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Veugen, Connie. 2011. “Computer Games as a Narrative Medium.” PhD diss., VU University Amsterdam.

PART I.

CRIME AND DETECTION IN LITERATURE

“BUT HERE, IN EDINBURGH! IT’S UNTHINKABLE.” BRINGING THE EVIL TO THE DOORSTEP IN IAN RANKIN’S KNOTS & CROSSES

MARKÉTA GREGOROVÁ

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest,

remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself,

shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically

that he remakes it in his own image.”

Joan Didion

“Oh my God, I seem to have written a crime novel by mistake while trying to write the great Scottish urban updating of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (Wanner 2011, 19). This is how the author Ian Rankin recalls his initial reaction after the publication of what was to become the first in a series comprising so far nineteen novels centred at the character of detective John Rebus. The book in question, Knots & Crosses (1987), inaugurated the rise of a specifically Scottish brand of crime fiction known under the label tartan noir. Drawing on the hard-boiled American noir crime writing rather than the genteel English murder mystery subgenre, tartan noir typically achieves greater psychological depth and complexity of characterization, thus sharing many affinities with modern Scandinavian detective fiction (Wanner 2011, 4–6). Aaron Kelly explains the implications of the term tartan noir: “The moniker Tartan Noir can be slyly evocative. A noir tartan, if such a thing were possible, encourages us to consider that patterns exist beneath an absolute, inscrutable darkness. This premise goes right to the heart of crime fiction. The genre has always sought to uncover the hidden connections, meanings or designs of the everyday” (2011, xiii).

Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) counts among the core Scottish works of fiction that continue to exercise a lasting influence on the national imagination. Stevenson’s story revolves around the motif of duality in that it examines the classic opposition of the good and the evil, dealing also with the contrasts between the public and the private identity, between appearance and authenticity, between the surface and under-the-surface and other such dichotomies. The novella depicts the plight of the highly regarded and well-liked Doctor Henry Jekyll, a morally upright man who attempts by scientific methods to separate virtue and vice in his character. He succeeds—and fails in creating his double, Mr Edward Hyde, an embodiment of pure evil that swiftly escalates far beyond what began as hardly worse than undignified indulgences and guilty pleasures. Initially, Jekyll can transform into Hyde and back at his will by swallowing a potion, and he takes deliberate delight in wreaking havoc in the streets at night in his disguise as another person. However, the more space Jekyll allows his formerly suppressed dark side to develop, the more vicious it grows. Eventually, after committing a series of heinous crimes including the brutal murder of an incidental victim, Jekyll becomes Hyde as he starts metamorphosing into his malevolent doppelgänger spontaneously. Jekyll realizes the error he made when he “severed in [him]self those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature,” and unable to return to his former complete, if imperfect self, he takes his life (Stevenson [1886] 1992, 60).

Edinburgh-born Stevenson chose to set Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in London, but in a London modelled on his native city, which he describes in these terms: “Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other, […] it is half alive and half a monumental marble” ([1890] 2009, 10). In the late nineteenth century, Stevenson perceived the schizophrenic condition of the Scottish capital behind whose impeccable façade people lead their usual lives and perform acts of virtue as much as acts of corruption and crime. A hundred years later, Ian Rankin sees Edinburgh as still inherently split between warring contradictions and outright incompatible opposites. Rankin, who studied at Edinburgh University, recalls in an interview his impression of the “Jekyll and Hyde nature to the city, or the kind of structural way it’s broken up into New Town and Old Town, where the New Town was designed to be rational and geometric because the Old Town’s chaotic. That’s kind of two sides to the human nature, seems to me the organized and the sort of feral” (Sloma 2012, 71). Rankin set out to write Knots & Crosses with the self-declared intention to modernize Stevenson’s original story by transferring it to Edinburgh of his present, that is the mid-1980s (2004, vii). He employs the city not merely as an arbitrary setting, rather Edinburgh features here as an integral part of the thematic structure of the novel so that it eventually rises to the status of a character on its own standing.

The dual nature of Edinburgh is mirrored in the novel’s protagonist, Detective Sergeant John Rebus, whose ambivalent characterization extends to the point when he becomes a suspect in the case that he investigates. Rankin’s premise for Knots & Crosses was simple to start with—in his own words, “cop as good guy (Jekyll), villain as bad guy (Hyde)”—yet he managed to create far greater intricacy and ambiguity than what is typically owed to genre fiction as a literary kind threatened by remaining formulaic (2004, vii). The crime of the novel consists of a string of kidnappings and murders by strangling of four pre-teenage girls with no apparent motive, sex crime having been excluded early in the process of investigation. Running parallel are two subplot lines: one of them focuses on anonymous cryptic messages that Rebus starts receiving at the same time as the so-called Edinburgh Strangler appears; the other follows Rebus’s brother Michael’s involvement in organized drug crime. Only when the last girl, Detective Rebus’s daughter Sammy, is kidnapped, does Rebus realize that from the beginning it was himself who was targeted and this by his former fellow Special Air Service trainee, Gordon Reeve, seeking a personal vendetta. The outcome of the Strangler case, together with Michael confessing his illegal activities to the unsuspecting Rebus, startles the protagonist with the revelation that the evil in all forms comes closer than even a criminal detective could anticipate.

A clash of contesting concepts has been described as an intrinsic feature of the Scottish psyche by G. Gregory Smith, who coined the phrase Caledonian antisyzygy in reference to “the very combination of opposites,” “the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn” and which are hence projected in the nation’s literature (1919, 4). Smith’s post-First-World-War diagnosis of the double Scottish character might seem reductionist and dated in the increasingly globalized and diversified era after postmodernism. Indeed, in a 2003 interview, Rankin feels urged to defend his unfashionable stance:

I’m still obsessed by the idea—and I know that a lot of critics think it is a simplistic one—of the Edinburgh character and the Scottish character being a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. I do think that we all have this darker side, I do think there is always more than one side to use, and I know damn fine that the side I present to the world is not the same Ian Rankin who sits down to write the books. (Plain 2003, 133, italics in original)

Rankin’s Knots & Crosses illustrates that even though he uses the elementary motif of duality as a launch pad, he refuses to draw a clear line dividing the opposite poles. Furthermore, instead of insisting on the sheer blackness of the villain’s world and the untainted whiteness of the detective’s territory, he negotiates in the grey in-between zone where the criminal and the policeman contend. The result is a surprisingly plastic narrative and well-rounded main character that convey the effect of life-like plurality rather than flat, straightforward duality.

The novel’s protagonist qualifies as an intriguing combination of the Byronic hero and the big detective character type: like the former, he is a mysterious figure standing aloof from the ordinary course of humanity; like the latter, he is a highly individualized personality with his unique idiosyncrasies and peculiarities (Kimmel and Aronson 2004, 122; Sýkora 2012, 24). Kirsten Sandrock notices Rebus’s “aversion to all forms of hierarchies, including the ones within his own police force,” and comments that “he may be part of the legal authority of the police, but he simultaneously challenges the authorities he works for” (2011, 160). Rebus’s dissenting attitude to official systems of power backs up the suspicion rising in the progress of the novel that he might be the perpetrator of the very crime that he ostentatiously looks to clarify. Moreover, it becomes soon obvious that the heavy-drinking and tough-talking Rebus himself possesses the capacity for evil, whether enacted as a minor misdemeanour or a grave offence. Early in the book, Rebus passes a grocery shop as he is returning from work in the early hours of the morning and casually steals some rolls from supply boxes left unattended on the pavement. On second thought, he stealthily returns and helps himself also to a pint of milk, while he remarks that the shop owner has complained to him about petty thefts, but that there is not much to be done.

Besides the bleakly humorous grocery scene, Rebus is shown later in the novel as possessed by a sudden murderous impulse and attempting to strangle a random female acquaintance before breaking down and coming to consciousness in hospital. The violent incident, portrayed in a surrealistic manner, could be a figment of Rebus’s imagination induced by overwork and stress related to the Strangler case, but no definite interpretation is offered. Aside from strangulation as modus operandi, what bears a major significance here is the occasion of the act. Rebus assaults the woman as they are about to make love, after she seduced him and he failed to reject her, though he found her unattractive, even repelling: “He felt the first wave of that absolute repulsion hit him in the stomach like a truncheon, and his hands slid around the hanging, yielding throat beneath him. The moans were inhuman now, cat-like, keening. His hands pushed a little, the fingers finding their own purchase against skin and sheet” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 95). The confusion of desire and disgust as derived from the fundamental Freudian conflict of eros and thanatos, love drive and death drive, reappears in another controversial scene. This involves Rebus and his co-worker Jack Morton studying records of former sex offenders in search for possible suspects and presents a revealing insight into Rebus’s divided nature:

The two men sat in silence for twenty minutes, flicking through the facts and fantasies of rapists, exhibitionists, pederasts, paedophiles, and procurers. Rebus felt his mouth filling with silt. It was as if he saw himself there, time after time after time, the self that lurked behind this everyday consciousness. His Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh-born. He felt ashamed of his occasional erection: doubtless Jack Morton had one too. It came with the territory, as did the revulsion, the loathing and the fascination. (Rankin [1987] 2004, 28)

Rebus’s thoughts evidence his self-consciousness regarding the potential of evil lurking in himself and in any other person, but they equally illustrate his awareness of the principles of civilized society that need to be upheld in order to keep the evil in check.

Rebus has no steady partner either in his private or in his professional life; he is divorced from his wife Rhona and manifests little devotion to his sometime lover and colleague, Detective Inspector Gill Templer, as follows also from his willingness to engage in casual sex with another woman. A withdrawn and deeply private person, he appears to shrink from commitment lest it should be used to his disadvantage, which turns out to be the case twice: when his daughter is abducted and when his brother is exposed as a criminal. Ironically, the key to hunting down the Strangler and rescuing Rebus’s daughter lies in the detective’s repressed memories of his former emotional attachment and loyalty to another human being—or betrayal of loyalty. Only under hypnosis performed on Rebus by his brother, professional hypnotist, does he remember details of the harsh training he underwent as a Special Air Service recruit. One of the trials testing the candidates’ suitability consisted in Rebus and Reeve being locked together in a cell for an indefinite amount of time and subjected to psychological torture. The two men passed the hours by playing the game of noughts and crosses, hence the pun in the title of the novel—Knots & Crosses—and hence the envelopes containing knots sent to Rebus by Reeve as a clue. Rebus succeeded in the excruciating test but was devastated inasmuch that he left the forces at his own request, while Reeve failed and blamed Rebus for supposedly abandoning him. Years later, Reeve orchestrates his revenge: “The past contaminates the present,” Gill Plain explains, “leading the detective to be read as suspect by those who do not recognise that his obsession with the victims of crime is not a sign of guilt but rather a sentimental masochism articulating the impotence of the individual in the face of evil and indifference” (2007, 134).

The novel features a remarkable minor character, the investigative journalist Jim Stevens, who may not exactly act as the detective’s sidekick in the conventional Sherlock-and-Watson sense, who nevertheless receives a significant space in the book as he discovers Michael Rebus’s illegitimate activities and tracks both Rebus brothers to confirm—or, as it happens, rule out—their criminal conspiracy. The disgruntled Stevens shares a number of affinities with Rebus, including his preference for field work, his habit of working alone and also his deeply-rooted bond to Edinburgh: “It was said that he had turned down jobs with London papers, just because he liked to live in Edinburgh. And what he liked best about his job was the opportunity it gave him to uncover the city’s murkier depths, the crime, the corruption, the gangs and the drugs” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 22). Like Rebus, also Stevens inhabits a self-imposed emotional void in order to prevent personal alliances from affecting his judgement. The reporter’s approach arguably contributes to his efficiency, and he compulsively pursues his story, even if “the ground he walked upon was always likely to fall away beneath his feet, letting him slip into Leith docks of a dark and silent morning, finding him trussed and gagged in some motorway ditch outside Perth. He didn’t mind all that. It was no more than a passing thought” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 29). Similarly, Rebus fails to establish any emotional connection with his environment, such as when he contemplates the sentimentally charged statue of Greyfriars Bobby, a favourite sight in Edinburgh which commemorates the faithful terrier who allegedly guarded the grave of his deceased master for fourteen years until its own death: “He had stared long and hard at the statue of the small dog, and had felt nothing. He had read of Covenanters, of Deacon Brodie, of public executions on the High Street, wondering what kind of city this was, and what kind of country” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 101).

Rebus rightly alludes to the less than glamorous history of Edinburgh, among whose most enduringly popular criminals are the eighteenth-century Deacon Brodie, a cabinetmaker by day and burglar by night, and Burke and Hare, early nineteenth-century body snatchers turned murderers who traded with cadavers for anatomy lectures. Perversely, the tourist metropolis commodifies and profits even from the grimmest aspects of its history, albeit sold in a suitably sanitized form. For instance, the Old Town’s main thoroughfare, Royal Mile, prides a traditional restaurant called Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, and sitting appropriately on the border between the Old and the New Town, there is the Edinburgh Dungeon, a sensational attraction whose performers routinely re-enact the city’s criminal past. The concept of criminality as commodity offered for consumption next to plaid, haggis and pipers has little in common with actual crime carried out either in the past or the present. Rather than as a capital of crime, Edinburgh strikes as the city of Enlightenment and pool of influential thinkers of the time, including the philosopher David Hume and the economist Adam Smith. Rankin’s novel summarizes the impression of the city thus: “There were ghosts in the cobbled alleys and on the twisting stairways of the Old Town tenements, but they were Enlightenment ghosts, articulate and deferential. They were not about to leap from the darkness with a length of twine ready in their hands” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 35).

A recurrent motif of Knots & Crosses is the sheer wonder of Edinburgh locals at the obscenity of the crimes happening at their very thresholds: “‘But here, in Edinburgh! It’s unthinkable.’ Mass murderers belonged to the smoky back streets of the South and the Midlands, not to Scotland’s picture-postcard city” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 84–85). The figure of an old-school detective, who operates in shabby pubs rather than white-collar offices and gathers information by the means of informants rather than up-to-date technology, serves as an excellent device for delving into the seedy and murky depths of the city. Rankin utilizes both actual and invented landmarks and geographical names, and as his protagonist moves around Edinburgh while investigating the case, he puts on the same footing the historical Old Town monuments and the disreputable Leith housing schemes. The contradictory double-sided character of the city is pondered on for example when Rebus observes Lothian Road, a busy Edinburgh thoroughfare, from the window of a moving taxi:

He was watching from his window as the city’s late-night drunks rolled their way up and down the obstacle-strewn hazard of Lothian Road, seeking alcohol, women, happiness. It was a never-ending search for some of them, staggering in and out of clubs and pubs and take-aways, gnawing on the packaged bones of existence. Lothian Road was Edinburgh’s dustbin. It was also home to the Sheraton Hotel and the Usher Hall. Rebus had visited the Usher Hall once, sitting with Rhona and the other smug souls listening to Mozart’s Requiem Mass. It was typical of Edinburgh to have a crumb of culture sited amidst the fast-food shops. A requiem mass and a bag of chips. (Rankin [1987] 2004, 57)

Despite the acknowledged existence of not-so-glamorous locations in the city incongruent with Edinburgh’s public shiny appearance, not even Rebus is ready to associate Edinburgh with crime easily. For him and fellow officers at the police station, criminality could be reasonably expected in places like the post-industrial Glasgow with its infamous history of street gangs, but certainly not in the country’s heavily marketed showcase city.

The competitive difference between Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, and Glasgow, Scotland’s most populous city, crops up repeatedly in the novel, often with a mild hint of grotesqueness. “That would make for a gang-war, Glasgow-style,” Stevens considers possible case development scenarios and bemoans the annoying elusiveness of Edinburgh’s criminals, in contrast to Glasgow’s unashamedly straightforward ones: “He liked the Glasgow gangsters of the 1950s and ’60s, who lived in the Gorbals [district] and operated from the Gorbals and loaned illicit money to neighbours, and who would slash those same neighbours eventually, when the need arose. It was like a family affair” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 146, 29). In this respect, the distinction between Edinburgh and Glasgow lies perhaps not as much in the imagined low criminality rate in the former and the profusion of crime in the latter as rather in the fact that, as Rankin puts it, “Edinburgh’s very good at hiding its secrets” (Sloma 2012, 74). While Glasgow certainly fares poorly regarding the level of crime and consistently ranks as Britain’s most violent city, in Edinburgh, to use Rankin’s words, “all the sins are there, but […] quite well hidden” (Review of Scotland’s Cities 2002, 118–24; Sloma 2012, 73). In his carefully researched comparative study of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Robert Crawford encapsulates the nature of the respective cities in a single pregnant statement: “Edinburgh is a wonderful museum of itself; […] Glasgow, a working industrial city” (2013, 27).

In his theoretical exploration of human beings in relation to their living environment, Michel de Certeau distinguishes between the notions of place and space: to him, place stands as a stable unit, “an instantaneous configuration of positions,” whereas space exists as a spontaneous creation, an “intersection of mobile elements” (1988, 117). Certeau argues that by inhabiting them, people transform inanimate places into live spaces, populating city streets “with the forests of their desires and goals”:

The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple “enunciative” function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements. (Certeau 1988, xxi, 97–98, italics in original)

Various areas in cities in general and Edinburgh in particular naturally cater to various social groups, each of them endowing their chosen place with a set of specific needs and wants. Edinburgh’s Old Town serves primarily to tourists, New Town to well-to-do locals, other areas to middle- and working-classes, and each of the resulting spaces bears keen imprints of their occupants, whether in the mood of the locality, its physical structure or a mixture of both.

The Edinburgh portrayed in Knots & Crosses comes alive on multiple levels, assuming a distinct character—even personality—when surveyed by Rebus and Stevens, for example, and when seen from the perspective of visitors to the city. The tourists’ versus the detective’s experience create the starkest opposition: “John Rebus was moving through the jungle of the city, that jungle the tourists never saw, being too busy snapping away at the ancient golden temples, temples long since gone but still evident as shadows. This jungle closed in on the tourists relentlessly but unseen, a natural force, the force of dissipation and destruction” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 157). What Rebus perceives as a hazardous jungle, the tourists view as an amusement maze. Even one and the same spot may present a duplicitous character, depending on the usage it is put to at given moment. Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, a pleasant green area conveniently located immediately off Princes Street, the New Town’s main thoroughfare, offers easy walks, panoramic views of the city and an array of monuments which won Edinburgh the soubriquet Athens of the North. After dark, however, its countenance changes radically, as Stevens notes while spying on Michael Rebus: “[T]hings hotted up at night: car chases, girls and boys hoping for a ride, parties at Queensferry beach. Edinburgh’s gay community would mix with those merely curious or lonely, and a couple, hand-in-hand, would now and again enter the graveyard at the bottom of the hill. When darkness fell, the east end of Princes Street became a territory all of its own, to be passed around, to be shared” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 51). This mid-1980s account of an area situated in the very heart of Edinburgh might be dated in some of its specifics, but writing in 2013, Crawford still laconically observes that “by night, Calton Hill can be dangerous” (2013, 135).

Although de Certeau’s theory speaks of humans moulding to their likeness the space they settle in rather than vice versa, it does not contradict de Certeau to suggest that the influence might be mutual. In Rankin’s novel, the characters impact on the setting as much as the setting impacts on them: “Edinburgh rain was like a judgement. It soaked into the bones, into the structures of the buildings, into the memories of the tourists. It lingered for days, splashing up from puddles by the roadside, breaking up marriages, chilling, killing, omnipresent” ([1987] 2004, 111). Besides the superficial communication that Edinburgh indeed has a rainy weather, this gloomy passage subtly alludes to the biblical judgement, flood and flood as judgement: the rain functions at once as apocalyptic and purging. Rankin exploits religious concepts at several points in Knots & Crosses. Appropriately to the crime fiction genre, Rebus discovers himself in what he describes as “an Old Testament land,” “a land of barbarity and retribution,” and appropriately to tartan noir, he concludes his thoughts with blackly comic profanity: “Rebus reminded himself to stop praying. Perhaps if he stopped praying, god would take the hint and stop being such a bastard to one of his few believers on this near-godforsaken planet” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 25). In a similar vein, the estranged Rebus reflects on the tall monument dedicated to Walter Scott on Princes Street, finding a looming threat rather than the consolation of religion in its “Gothic missile”: “The Scott Monument pointed religious believers in the right direction, but few of the tourists who snapped it with their expensive Japanese cameras seemed at all interested in the structure’s symbolic connotations, never mind its reality, just so long as they had some snaps to show off to their friends back home” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 69).

Ian Rankin insists that in his crime novels he aims at “writing about urban experience and society, about current affairs and politics, […] a lot more than just trying to tell a good story that will keep you engaged on a train journey” (Wanner 2011, 5). He apparently does not reject the notion of politically slanted fiction; after all, when he recalls the beginnings of his project to write the Edinburgh novel that became Knots & Crosses, he mentions as his models proponents of the Glasgow novel, William McIlvanney, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, all of them strongly politically and socially committed (Rankin 2004, vii). There is no such crudeness as an openly declared political manifesto in the writing of either of these authors, nevertheless, Rankin’s novel invites wider implications for instance in terms of the choice of protagonist. John Rebus stands out as an isolated individual who acts on his own and who, as Rankin puts it, “almost behaves like an anarchist, creating a system to live by that is at odds with society and the police structure” (Plain 2003, 133). In the 1980s, when Knots & Crosses was written, Scotland as the less prosperous part of Great Britain suffered particularly heavily under the economic reforms introduced by Margaret Thatcher, and anti-establishment mood prevailed. Plain contends that “the alienated figure of the detective was a trope well suited to the articulation of opposition to Thatcherism, and from these polemical roots crime fiction developed into an ideal formula for investigating the state of Scotland” (2003, 132). The modern state-of-the-nation novel in Scottish literature tends to be marked by existential contemplation and distrust of official ideologies, which applies also to Knots & Crosses.

“I wanted to show tourists and outsiders that there was more to these places than shortbread and tartan, golf and whisky and castles,” Rankin asserts when discussing the motives behind his work about his native country and continues, “Scotland faces the same challenges as any other nation. We worry about crime, the environment, education and health, employment and migration” (2005, 120). Provided that Rebus acts as Rankin’s “mouthpiece,” according to the author’s claim in his introduction to Knots & Crosses, then Rankin appears to bear a particular grudge against the tourist industry (2004, viii). Sandrock helpfully clarifies Rebus’s/Rankin’s seemingly inexplicable hostility against tourism, pointing out that the precise target of the critique is not the tourists as such but “the touristic commodification of Edinburgh,” which “is challenged for its prioritisation of outward beauty and splendour while neglecting the harsher realities of the city” (2011, 165). In Sandrock’s reading, Rankin presents the “duality of the Scottish soul not as an intrinsic character trait” in agreement with G. Gregory Smith’s original view, “but rather as a socio-economically determined condition” (2011, 155). Some of the more blatantly critical passages in the novel confirm this impression, such as Rebus’s following bitter complaint: “The tourist side of his capital city. They were never interested in the housing-estates around this central husk. They never ventured into Pilton or Niddrie or Oxgangs to make an arrest in a piss-drenched tenement; they were not moved by Leith’s pushers and junkies, the deft-handed corruption of the city gents, the petty thefts of a society pushed so far into materialism that stealing was the only answer to what they thought of as their needs” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 69). Rankin certainly qualifies as a socially critical writer, yet despite the occasionally harsh statements uttered by his characters, he avoids the pitfalls of creating a self-righteous protagonist who professes to have all the answers.

Rankin’s novel culminates in a symbolically endowed confrontation of Rebus with the murderer which takes place literally under the surface, in a maze of ancient corridors and cells buried under the Edinburgh Central Library. Edinburgh’s Old Town is known to have been built in haphazard heights due to space restrictions, with entire new streets erected on top of old ones, some of which have been preserved underground until today. In the novel, the building of the library can be seen as representing the heritage of the Edinburgh Enlightenment and is also associated with the present times and appearances on the surface. The vaults under the library, formerly used by the Sheriff Court, conjure the ghosts of the city’s dark past and stand for Edinburgh’s unsavoury underbelly. Here, Rebus is forced to exorcize the ghosts of his own past as he challenges his opponent, who turns out to be employed as a children’s librarian, convenient to his criminal intent. Following from the two men’s climactic one-on-one struggle, Sandrock interprets Rebus “as a figure of resistance against the Enlightenment ideas of intellectualism and progress” which “is particularly eager to resist those cultural and material forces that associate these Enlightenment ideas with Edinburgh” (2011, 153). Rebus undermines the superficial perception of Edinburgh as a historical artefact marketed to the tourists and instead expresses in his attitude his need to know and reveal to others the city in its multilayered entirety, picturesque or otherwise. This view corresponds with the conclusion of the novel, where “Edinburgh had shown itself … as never before, cowering beneath the shadow of the Castle Rock in hiding from something. All the tourists saw were shadows from history, while the city itself was something else entirely” (Rankin [1987] 2004, 181).

Works Cited

Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Crawford, Robert. 2013. On Glasgow and Edinburgh. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Kelly, Aaron. 2011. Introduction to Dead Sharp: Scottish Crime Writers on Country and Craft, by Len Wanner, xiii–xx. Isle Uig: Two Ravens Press.

Kimmel, Michael, and Amy Aronson. 2004. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

Plain, Gill. 2007. “Concepts of Corruption: Crime Fiction and the Scottish ‘State’.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, edited by Berthold Schoene, 132–40. Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press.

Plain, Gill. 2003. “Rankin Revisited: An Interview with Ian Rankin.” Scottish Studies Review 4 (1): 126–37.

Rankin, Ian. 2004. “Introduction: Exile on Princes Street.” In Rebus: The Early Years, vii–viii. London: Orion.

———. (1987) 2004. Knots & Crosses. In Rebus: The Early Years, 1–182. London: Orion.

———. 2005. Rebus’s Scotland: A Personal Journey. London: Orion.

Review of Scotland’s Cities: The Analysis. 2002. Government report. Edinburgh.

Sandrock, Kirsten. 2011. “The Quest for Authenticity: History and Class in Ian Rankin’s Rebus Novels.” Scottish Literary Review 3 (1): 153–67.

Sloma, Stefani. 2012. “The City as Character: Edinburgh in the Works of Ian Rankin.” Researcher: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25 (2): 53–91.

Smith, G. Gregory. 1919. Scottish Literature: Character and Influence. London: Macmillan.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. (1890) 2009. “Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes.” In Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, The Silverado Squatters, and Will o’ the Mill, 7–100. Rockville: Wildside.

———. (1886) 1992. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Campbell.

Sýkora, Michal et al. 2012. Britské detektivky: Od románu k televizní sérii. Olomouc: Palacky University Olomouc.

Wanner, Len. 2011. “Ian Rankin: Rough Justice in Tartan Noir.” In Dead Sharp: Scottish Crime Writers on Country and Craft, 1–37. Isle Uig: Two Ravens Press.

ACCURATE OR ELSE?: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT IN THE TROUBLES THRILLERS—DANNY MORRISON’S THE WRONG MAN AND STUART NEVILLE’S THE TWELVE

MICHAELA MARKOVÁ

The Northern Irish ethno-political conflict, euphemistically called the Troubles, and atrocities committed during such have proved difficult to comprehend for many people. One of the views put forward as a possible explanation that became available as violence escalated asserted that the disturbances were brought about by crazed, blood thirsty hardliners, republican mainly. Their blood thirst was claimed by some to be an inherent quality and hence the cause for persistence of the strife as it implied that the radicals were incapable of reconciliation. Due to the prevalence of such a view, Northern Ireland was consequently perceived as a dark, secluded place, doomed to sectarian violence. This limited, and limiting, perspective of the conflict became widespread not only in reality but in fiction as well. It has been claimed that the Troubles have attracted more creative attention than any other modern struggle. Over 800 novels have supposedly been written that deal with this issue (Kennedy 2005).[1] The genre of fiction that has been identified as the one most commonly applied to depict the Troubles is the thriller. Owing to its subject matter, use of violence, the aforementioned limited/limiting perspective manifested primarily within this form.[2] Numerous works that embodied such were then occasionally labelled as “Troubles trash” (Bell 1978, 22), as a result of which the genre has often been omitted from academic discussions with people turning to poetry and drama “for serious literary engagement with the Troubles” (Kennedy-Andrews 2003, 7). In fact, issues concerning accuracy of the early Troubles narratives have made people consider whether the thriller is an adequate means to discuss such a complex predicament the Northern Irish conflict is deemed to be.

Despite the aforementioned suggestions about the contrary, it has been argued that the thriller is not a “vacant structure” which simply frames “an explicitly standard exegesis.” Examples exist that confirm the form can accommodate multifaceted issues and hence it would be naive to think its sub-genre, the Troubles thriller, simply offers “a passive reflection of the North’s degradation” (Kelly 2005, 1–6). Aaron Kelly’s seminal study of Troubles thrillers, The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror, confirms that a considerable variety of viewpoints concerning the conflict has been represented in the Troubles thrillers, which attests to the complexity of the issue as well as to that of the genre itself. Instead of unquestioningly accepting the erroneous view that the Troubles thriller has been correlative in a configural narrative of violence, embodied by the blood thirsty hardliners, it is advisable to consider whether the limited representation of the conflict in the “Troubles trash” has not been informed by specific intentions the authors have had for the texts and as what has inspired those intentions. Cultural, political and social climate, the products of which the thrillers are, has to be thoroughly, critically examined.

Proceeding from the assumption that the thriller can, indeed, be used as a means suitable for critical commentary, the following paragraphs will first briefly discuss works from the early stages of the Troubles. Specifically, various perspectives that have informed the authors’ views of the conflict they put forward in their works will be considered to address the issue of the limited/limiting discourse. Reasons for objections to such representation will be documented too as these have affected the way numerous writers have subsequently depicted the conflict in their own works. Next, two novels that have been claimed to have challenged the limited/limiting Troubles discourse will be analysed to document whether and, if so, how their narratives differ from this discourse. Also, the messages these texts put forward will be discussed in relation to the current status quo in Northern Ireland. Both the novels—Morrison’s The Wrong Man (1997) and Neville’s The Twelve (2009)—deal with the actively involved; doing so is thus particularly pertinent as it has been claimed it is with those that successful transformation of Northern Irish society lies.  Provided that the assumptions about the authors’ perceptive and innovative approach to the subject prove right, the texts might help us gain greater insight into ways out of the impasse with which Northern Ireland is said to have been currently afflicted.[3] Consideration of this issue is also important due to a recent rise of interest in the thriller genre from and/or about Northern Ireland.

“Troubles Trash”?

Certain thriller types that seemed to restrict themselves to a deterministic view of the conflict prevailed, as has been stated above, particularly in the early stages of the Troubles. Contrary to some accusations, interpretations of the conflict these offered was not, as Aaron Kelly (2005) and Patrick Magee (2001) confirm, merely incurred by the generic structure of the thriller, it was dependent on the then current socio-political issues and on the specific views individual writers advocated. The following paragraphs will briefly outline the thriller types that have been branded as presenting inaccurate portrayal of the conflict and address the features that have been identified as their deficiencies. However, these should be considered with caution as not all the authors whose works could be put under the same labels as those mentioned below are guilty of oversimplification and/or inaccuracy.[4]

A “remarkable” proportion of Troubles thrillers has been written by journalists (Magee, 2001, 8).[5] Although one would expect those fictional works to contain the same amount of factual accuracy their authors were required to ensure in their journalistic writing, Magee demurs that accuracy of those works was, at times, rather lacking. This inexactitude, Joseph McMinn asserts, relates to how the conflict was reported on in general (1980). Given the fast pace with which events in the early stages of the conflict changed, reporters who had flown to Northern Ireland to comment on the affairs allegedly did not have time to explore the complexities of the situation and many thus employed a view that might seem rather superficial.[6] Moreover, a majority of those reporters were British and due to their allegiance, Magee claims, their fiction conveyed predominantly a “biased” perspective instead of “a probing, investigative realism” (2001, 8–9). As well as journalists, also a number of politicians have been deemed guilty of moonlighting and oversimplification, including Douglas Hurd, the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Both journalists and politicians have been claimed to have capitalized on the status their profession allowed them. Thereby, Titley argues, their otherwise “improbable tale[s]” acquired “verisimilitude” (1980, 19).

Populist militarism of the Thatcher period, Kelly asserts, incurred that the “figure of the journalist mediating an Irish otherness to the ‘Troubles’ thriller’s designated audience was […] usurped by the figure of the soldier” (2005, 40), particularly that of the Special Air Services (SAS) member dispatched to Northern Ireland. Following the mitigation of the Official Secrets Act 1989, a considerable number of soldiers and army operatives decided to reflect on their experience in fictional works.[7] Not only the authors with such a background dealt with related subject matters, the SAS soldiers’ experience generally became a prominent theme in Troubles writing with the maverick voices gaining almost “a collective resonance” (Kelly 2005, 40). This tendency allegedly also depended on the British attitude to the Troubles in general. Hence it was to be expected that the drift towards the military intervention being accepted as the only possible resolution to the conflict and the British counter-insurgency measures would manifest in fictional works published at that time too.

Voicing Dissent

Despite their prevalence, the limited/limiting views of the conflict presented in some of the early Troubles thrillers were not generally accepted. They have been disputed on the basis of two reasons. First, the texts presenting such were believed deliberately or unintentionally to have omitted relevant information and/or opinions that would not befit the specific perspective individual writers put forward. The narrow-minded perspective has been disapproved particularly as it contributed to Northern Ireland being viewed as “a recalcitrantly regressive place somehow separate from the modern progressive world” (Hughes 1991, 1), as, many have maintained, there has been more to life in the region than this suggested. The second reason is, in effect, implicit in the first. However, it has been discussed separately since its advocates have argued more weight should have been placed exclusively on such issue. It concerns the self-image perpetrators (predominantly those of republican origin) have themselves tried to establish and how they were viewed by others. This perpetrators’ self-stylization was continuously being undermined by the British government’s perspective of the conflict, which Morrison asserts was put forward in the early thriller types mentioned above. Morrison goes as far to suggest, even if facetiously, that the early thrillers served as “the paraliterary wing of Brit propaganda” (2001, v). He adds, seriously now, those works “function[ed] in the same way as the ‘unofficial’ censorship and later the broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein”: by “suppressing the discrepant [republican] voice whilst supporting the dominant [British] ideology on the causes of the conflict” (Morrison 2001, vi).[8] The republicans’ qualities depicted in such novels have been perceived as being purposely defined in a negative way and, more importantly, as being inherent since such allegedly justified for the British the necessity to suppress the republicans, should the conflict ever be resolved. In other words, it has been claimed that the Irish were purposely described as getting “their madness from their mother’s milk” as such supposedly enabled the British government’s officials and the security forces to justify their hostile policy against them (Morrison 2001, v–vii).

With respect to which of the two abovementioned reasons succeeding authors saw as underlying the limited/limiting Troubles discourse, they have chosen various strategies to challenge such. Those who have objected to the general narrow-mindedness of the texts sought to emphasize the complexity of the situation, while authors from the republican background, particularly those with experience of active involvement in the conflict, felt it their (moral) obligation to rectify what they perceived as dishonoured republican image. Those authors perceived that unchallenged, the dishonoured republican image would have continued to cosset “the [British] establishment from domestic criticism” and allowed “it a free hand” (Morrison 2001, vi), which was deemed unacceptable. In consideration of the authors’ views on the conflict, as well as in respect to the novels’ publication dates, it is to be expected that Danny Morrison’s The Wrong Man and Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, this article will now address, differ in what they seek to convey about the Troubles.

The Wrong Man was written by a prominent Irish republican. It is hence discussed in relation to the claim that only individuals who believe in and pursue republican principles can critically and/or accurately represent these in fiction (Magee 2001, 38). Its analysis will thus consider the qualities Morrison deems typical of the republican hero and question whether such portrayal serves to determine how the readers should perceive his actions, which might, in fact, undermine the aforementioned claims at accuracy. The Twelve develops around an actively involved republican too, however, it was written by an author who, contrary to Morrison, has not actively pursued the republican principles. Moreover, Neville’s novel was written after the 1998 Agreement, in the period when the Northern Irish predicament as such was considered with a strong critical retrospective. Therefore, prospective differences in the attitude towards the perpetrators’ role in the Troubles between the two novels will be documented, particularly in connection to how the texts relate this issue to the outcome of the conflict.

The Cost of Resistance to the British Rule: The Image of the Republican Hero in Danny Morrison’s The Wrong Man

Danny Morrison’s The Wrong Man follows the story of a republican perpetrator, Raymond Massey, from the moment of his release from prison shortly before the 1981 hunger strikes to his death at the hands of the British Army a couple of years later.[9] The exact reasons why Raymond joined the IRA are not addressed as it seems that the fact that he comes from a Catholic working-class area of Belfast should be self-explanatory.  However, in the beginning of the story proper, Raymond experiences an encounter which suggests what the motives he had to become actively involved might have been. The account of such also presents one of many allusions to Raymond’s honourableness as, this article argues, the text seeks to establish him as a positive character. Now an experienced old hand in the movement, Raymond enlists a Catholic youth, Tod Malone, who seeks to prove himself worthy to become a member of the IRA:

“I go to all the marches and riot at night. I want to do more. I hate the Brits and what they’ve done. They killed a cousin of mine. Out minding his own business. Stopped and searched. Told him he could go on. It was pouring rain, and when he ran away they shot him in the back and said they thought he was going for a gun. […] I can’t stand by while men are dying on hunger strike. It just brings everything into focus, doesn’t it?” (Morrison 1997, 42)

This reminds Raymond of the time when he, too, “begged a man now dead to get him into the IRA” (Morrison 1997, 42) so that he could help to protect the disadvantaged Catholic community. He, the same as many young republicans, became a member of the IRA in the beginning of the Troubles. The Sixties and early Seventies were, generally, an era characterized by the questioning of cultural and socio-political values. In Northern Irish context, it was a period when a feeling of an urgent need for a radical change of the then current predicament arose, predominantly “among republicans” due to the adverse conditions they lived in (Magee 2001, 40). The excerpt above emphasizes the fact that Raymond and the other republicans were minding their own business and eventually resorted to physical force only in reaction to the British aggression against their own. Hence their use of violence is perceived as justified, since they had no other option but to associate with the movement and join in the fight, were they and their beloved to survive.

The narrative that follows this incident elaborates on Raymond’s virtuousness. His determination to do more than take part in the Civil Rights marches and riot at night is deemed genuine and perseverant, hence he has been able to persist in his resistance against the establishment. His recruit’s determination, on the contrary, is undermined when he admits that his active involvement was a waste of time (Morrison 1997, 166). One might assume that Tod had become frustrated with his units’ operations’ outcomes or that his commitment had simply waned. However, the incentives that inspired it are, purposely, presented as questionable to allege that he “wasn’t cut out for this type of life” (Morrison 1997, 166) at all. How else, the text insinuates, could he have turned an informer and betrayed his comrades? Therefore, what might have initially seemed as an analogy between the two protagonists proves to be the contrary. Indeed, the novel contraposes Tod and Raymond, the despicable renegade Volunteer and the committed republican. The author applies the same strategy in his portrayal of the protagonist’s wife, Róisín, which alludes to what the representational onus the novel seeks to achieve is: to uphold republican honour and to laud the actively involved’s perseverance, particularly in the face of adversity.[10]

Morrison has asserted that The Wrong Man aims to provide “a sympathetic portrayal” of female protagonists which challenges restrictive patriarchal hegemony (2005, n. p.). The text considers the situation of the actively involved’s partners complicated, however, in Róisín’s case, it rather seems to focus on the protagonist’s inability to come to terms with such. While Róisín struggles with abnegating her personal wishes in the name of the cause, she is deemed self-centred (Morrison 1997, 86), reluctant to fully support Raymond’s active involvement in the conflict. This unsupportiveness, the narrative insinuates, has tragic consequences. Róisín is depicted as having failed at the prescribed role due to her lack of the qualities that would make her an adequate spouse Raymond, “a great guy” without whom people would be lost, deserved. In fact, the text belittles her. At several occasions, when Róisín is required to make a decision consequences of which are likely to affect her life significantly, she tends to do so without considering the situation adequately, the same as when “she [first] wondered could she have […] stuck by” Raymond (Morrison 1997, 31). Thoughtlessness is a feature generally common to young individuals at lower stages of their psycho-sexual development (Wrightsman 1994). The text, irrespective of Róisín’s age and marital status, repeatedly refers to her as to a girl (Morrison 1997, 53, 203), suggesting that she has not matured yet. Recurring textual references, literal as well as indirect, to her naivety seem to validate such a view: Róisín is continuously being reminded of Raymond’s undying devotion to the struggle, however, she believes she might actually succeed in her efforts to “dilute his rigorous approach to life” (Morrison 1997, 36). Her ignorance is initially perceived with a smile (Morrison 1997, 31), since it is thought of as temporary. However, her behaviour gradually becomes regarded as disrespect of the republican struggle as Róisín, similarly to Tod, is claimed not to have developed true appreciation of republican objectives. This portrayal subsequently makes it easier for the text to claim Raymond’s moral superiority.

The fact that both Róisín and Tod are meant to stand for “manipulative, exploitative, egoistical individual[s] who had squandered [republican] nobility” (Morrison 1997, 207) is confirmed in the final chapter of the novel. In a moment of infatuation, Róisín and Tod are depicted as having forgotten “about future, about tomorrow, about other people” and tumble “through the weightless universe of sex” (Morrison 1997, 204, 207). Although they actually do not consummate their relationship, their conduct is deemed culpable so as to attest they represent the exact antitheses of the republican virtues. Owing to the representational objective of the novel, it is imperative that their contemptibleness should subsequently be reciprocated, particularly so as it brings about Raymond’s downfall. The chapter which describes Róisín and Tod’s perfidy follows those which reveal what happens to them afterwards. Since both the protagonists are aware of their action and possible repercussions of it and as the revelation of the details of their escapade does not, in any significant way, contribute to the development of the story, it seems as if this chapter was added as a justification of the damaging consequences Róisín and Tod must bear.[11] In fact, the ending appears to serve also as a warning to the readers asserting that those who betray the republican community and its ideals might rightly expect a similar fate.

In his consideration of one’s milieu on their work, Morrison acknowledges some might assert that “the artist should keep himself free from all creed, from all dogma, from all opinion” (2001, vi). However, he seems rather to believe that any “serious writer in society” has “social, moral and/or political responsibilities,” particularly so if he is “forged in injustice as a sword is forged” (Morrison 2001, vi, emphasis in original).[12] Morrison has objected to republicans being portrayed as fanatic types, who need to spill “a whole river of blood” to achieve their goals (2001, vi). He argues that this portrayal does not correspond to reality as it focuses merely on one aspect of the republican struggle ignoring the incentives that inspired it. Morrison might be right to claim that some of the texts he challenges are removed from republican experience of “the discrimination, the suffering and oppression” and might be thus less credible (Morrison 2001, vii). His own narrative, however, is no more accurate as, owing to strong preference it gives to republican issues, it is equally monologic. Even if some might think such focus unproblematic, by providing engagé fiction, Morrison does not, Eugene McEldowney rightly observes, transcend the recourse to stereotypes (1997). In fact, given Morrison’s background,[13] the novel is biased as it adverts to narrative strategies that are not only to humanize the main protagonist but it adverts also to those that actually seek to arouse sympathy with him and the movement.

From its very start, the text asserts that the qualities that sustain Raymond in his ordeal are determination, faithfulness and solidarity. He, like numerous other actively involved republicans, faced imprisonment for his politically motivated acts. Contrary to the official discourse of the British government that refers to such people as perpetrators and to some of their deeds as crimes against humanity, the narrative presents Raymond as a conscious man dedicated to the cause. His incarceration, part of which he spent on dirty protest, is seen as another stage of the “battle,” his injuries inflicted “for refusing to wear a prison uniform, for not moving fast enough on a wing shift, for resisting anal searches” are his “battle wounds” (Morrison 1997, 21). Reverting to such expressions, Morrison seeks to elevate republican resistance to a position of a war, a strategy that has served republicans to claim official acknowledgement of their struggle. The text also seeks to posit the republican movement as constructed around “supposedly natural bonds and attachments” so as to claim organicity, “obviously strategically beneficial to the nationalist subject as point de capiton” (Kelly 2005, 15). This is why the text alludes to the relationship between the republican prisoners in filial terms. Moreover, affinity similar to that alleged between the republican prisoners is claimed typical of members of the active operation units. This is particularly apparent from Raymond’s reminiscences of “those with whom he had been in action”:

when four or five lives and his own were fused into one organism, not just in the temporary heat of riding around in a car with rifles or planting a bomb but for days on end experiencing tension, fear and terror; the swarming bacteria of death in one’s mouth; then relief, the euphoria of success and the sweetness of survival. And, of course, those comrades who had died he loved with fierce pride and loyalty, and carried something of them within. Continuity. Survivors carried the dead within, part of the aggregate of responsibility, an eternal compact. (Morrison 1997, 46, emphasis added)

While in the case of republican prison experience, the text seems to focus mainly on implications of such for the actively involved, in its discussion of paramilitary violence, it puts forward a suggestion directed towards the readership. It appeals to the survivors who, like Raymond, have the responsibility to the fallen republican compatriots not only to ensure continuity of the struggle until the objectives are met but to honour the principles eternally. Owing to Raymond’s premature and tragic death at the hands of the British Army, the novel stresses “the responsibility to complete republican aspiration” (Magee 2001, 202).[14] Doing so, the novel moves from the passive representational goal to that which seeks an actual change of the predicament. Thusly, the novel, in a way, helps to sustain the predicament as it claims that unless the enemy is annihilated, the struggle has to continue.

“Haunting Legacies”: Making Peace with the Past in Stuart Neville’s The Twelve

Following the long period of tortuous implementation of the 1998 Agreement into practice, eventual restoration to power of the Northern Irish Assembly in 2007 was met with great anticipation as the two largest parties representing the opposing traditions, Democratic Unionist Party and republican Sinn Féin, agreed to enter power-sharing government together. Stuart Neville’s novel The Twelve[15] takes place around the time when Northern Ireland is about to enter what has been described as a new, post-Troubles era. Nevertheless, it does not seem to focus extensively on what possibilities future might open up for the region, not at least in a celebrative sense. Many have believed that the political framework provided by the subsequent St Andrews Agreement (2006) that led to the actual restoration of the Assembly would help Northern Ireland’s divided society to resolve its differences and thus end the painful chapter of its history. Neville’s literary treatment of the subject, however, implies that that chapter has yet to be finished. In fact, this article argues, issues related to the subject matter The Twelve deals with attest that to end the said chapter might not be even possible. The following paragraphs will discuss those issues and the way they are addressed in the novel to determine what such conveys about the Northern Irish predicament and its prospects. It will also be considered whether the novel complies with or challenges the limiting/limited discourse of the early Troubles thrillers.

The Twelve charts the efforts of a former republican “foot soldier,”[16] Gerry Fegan, at making peace with his disturbing past. It is thus not only a Troubles thriller, as which it has been marketed the most,[17] but that what might be termed a “traumatic narrative” (Schwab 2010).[18] Its main protagonist buried inadmissible experience from his past in what Abraham and Torok call “an inner crypt” (1994), yet such intrudes upon him years later. The Twelve is, indeed, a haunted text[19] as spectres of the deceased Fegan killed while in paramilitary service begin to follow him when he is about to be released from prison:

They’d been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison […]. He’d just been given his release date, printed on a sheet of paper in a sealed envelope, and his mouth was dry when he opened it. […] The followers were there when Fegan looked up from the letter, watching. (Neville 2009, 8–9)

While the ghosts initially emerge only occasionally and in a blurred form, in the course of time, they tend to accompany Fegan everywhere he goes and their shapes actually begin to materialize too, which causes him considerable discomfort. Owing to their constant presence and their alleged vocal expressions, Fegan, unsure of what else to do, turns to drink to alleviate his misery. However, his belief that “they’d leave him alone” if “he had one more drink” is shattered as “the twelve [… continue to] follow Fegan through the streets of Belfast, into his house, up his stairs, and into his bedroom” (Neville 2009, 3). The protagonist’s distress gradually deepens which is to confirm that he has found himself in a rather unenviable situation.

Manifestations of Fegan’s uneasiness soon become apparent to other people and concerns about his mental wellbeing are raised since no one else actually seems to see his followers but Fegan occasionally talking to them. Mental disturbance is a factor that might undermine incentives for Fegan’s subsequent behaviour. However, despite the fact that Fegan himself seems to doubt his sanity as he repeatedly questions what is “happening” to him, the narrative asserts the ghosts are not mere delusions of his mind brought about by his excessive alcohol consumption. Indeed, their existence is eventually authenticated as the readers learn that another character has seen one of “the twelve” too (Neville 2009, 459–460). This is to undermine suggestions that the ghosts are simply projections of Fegan’s guilt and hence to fend off the question of Fegan’s judgment, however debatable that actually is. Doing so, the text brings the protagonist’s suffering back into focus, establishing him in a somewhat victimized position. When Fegan’s efforts to make one of the ghosts disappear by telling his mother the location of his dead body fails,[20] he becomes convinced he had used up all the conventional options he had to free himself of the spectral emanations. This conviction then makes it easier for him to accept the task the ghosts eventually charge him with as he truly believes there is nothing else he could have done but to kill those who partook in the gruesome murders of the twelve. His subsequent deeds and the narrative that depicts them, the following paragraphs will attest, present discourse that challenges yet that also reiterates the aforementioned limiting/limited perspective of the conflict.

In his quest to free himself of the ghosts, Fegan confronts his former colleagues and friends, which enables Neville to comment on both the past and the current state of the republican movement. The Twelve evaluates its different bodies, yet it is the “insurgents-turned politicians [who] remain coy about their own histories” (Lodge 2013, n. p.) that seem to receive the most criticism.[21] The text problematizes their motivation to support peaceful resolution to the conflict, implying that they have not always acted as the peace brokers. Indeed, the novel suggests that some of them are “the powerful men who orchestrated decades of brutal civil conflict,” and “survived to make dishonest fortunes in peacetime” (Stasio 2009, BR30, emphasis added). The formerly involved are claimed to have hidden their true intentions, feigned interest in ordinary people’s affairs, and tried to justify their own contentious acts by saying that “nobody’s hands are clean” so why would they need to be different (Neville 2009, 11)? Asserting such, the text challenges the image representatives of the republican community have tried to establish for themselves, insinuating they might not have been what they have claimed to be. The novel’s critique of contemporary Northern Irish society, however, addresses other topics than its politics only. It considers more general issues related to the Troubles, such as urban redevelopment that ensued after the end of the violent phase of the conflict, and that some have viewed as an adequate indicator to confirm that the transition of Northern Ireland has been completed. This, however, the main protagonist concurs with experts on spatial planning, is a limited view as there is more to social transformation than economic growth and retail development.

Neville’s fictional assessment of the movement as well as of the socio-political and economic conditions presents interesting issues to ponder. Nevertheless, there are reasons why some readers, other than republican sympathizers, might find the novel merely “tolerable” (Sansom 2009, B10) and hence not consider what it might contribute to the discussion about the status quo. The major problem is how The Twelve reflects violence in general as well as that of the main character.[22] In fact, the novel has been claimed to be “basically a revenge tragedy in the Elizabethan mode, scripted by Quentin Tarantino and produced by the makers of The Bourne Identity” (Sansom 2009, B10). Indeed, once Fegan “accepts his deadly commission and the assassinations begin, it’s not hard to read this disturbing text as a blood-soaked thriller” (Stasio 2009, BR30), the narrative of which seems, at times, somewhat unrealistic.[23]

What is also problematic is the claim that the ghosts disappear as soon as Fegan disposes of those who were allegedly responsible for their deaths, at least when compared to what trauma theory asserts. Fegan’s efforts are to silence the ghosts as he cannot bear their screaming (Neville 2009, 457), yet by killing those responsible for their deaths he buries violent histories of which the ghosts are reminders without them having been properly engaged with. This then casts their (hi)stories “outside the continuity of psychic life” and “unintegrated and unassimilated, they eat away at this continuity from within” (Schwab 2010, 1, 49). Unless the traumatic event is reflected upon and processed, the “undead ghost” constantly threatens to come back (Schwab 2010, 1). Therefore, while Fegan believes that if he survives his ordeal he might “have a life” (Neville 2009, 458), the quality of such is rather debatable. In fact, read through Schwab’s theory, it is probable that Fegan’s life will become a shadow life, a “simulacra of a hollowed-out normality” (2010, 49). Moreover, the fact remains that to get rid of the ghosts, Fegan takes more lives. Not only are thus the buried ghosts of the past expected to resurface, they are likely to be accompanied by others, those of Fegan’s new victims.[24] Furthermore, despite the fact that he killed several more people, Fegan seems to get off rather lightly. His situation at the end of the story is far from ideal, still, having endured an exchange of heavy gunfire, the last of the ghosts who requested Fegan to pay for the crimes he had committed is merciful to him and eventually allows him to escape without having to pay the price the others had to pay (Neville 2009, 453–460). Hence, some might think the novel purposely refuses to discuss certain contentious aspects of the main protagonist’s behaviour so as to gratify sensationalist readership which “feeds voraciously on thrillers and romances” (Kennedy-Andrews 2003, 7), even if such might not have been the author’s original intention.

Troubled Resolutions

Both discussed novels, although they are fictional renderings of the subject matter, focus on the perpetrator’s perspective of the predicament. Therefore, it could be said that they constitute an important contribution to the dialogue of its possible resolution, particularly so as Neville’s novel raises the issue of “reclamation and legitimization of unrepentant terrorists” (Stasio 2009, BR30).  Nevertheless, as this article has suggested, however briefly, the representational onus to depict the conflict in its complexity is problematized by other objectives the authors wish the texts to fulfil. Indignation over the way republican combatants were depicted in some of the early examples of the Troubles thrillers has inspired a number of authors, including Danny Morrison. Those authors have disagreed with “the composite Irish republican […] Mother Ireland-fixated psycho-killer, aka a Provo Godfather” that materialized from such “biased” accounts (Magee 2001, 2) and sought to produce works that would redeem the Irish republican perspective. The Wrong Man has been claimed to convey “a palpable sense” of “dark urgency of life under British occupation” documenting “the costs of resistance to British rule: the graves, the prison cells, the disruptions to family, and wrecked personal relationships” (Magee 2001, 202). The author’s depiction of “emotionally attritional terrain” is sure to accommodate feelings of those familiar with and/or in favour of republican “collective trauma” (Magee 2001, 202), particularly as it discusses that which has been claimed frequently omitted from the official discourse. However, the author’s past as a leading republican strategist and spokesperson and his enthusiastic support for the cause manifest themselves rather significantly within the narrative which undermines the claim that the novel is free of distortion. Indeed, the novel, in a way, sustains the predicament as it claims that unless the region is purged of the establishment, the struggle has to continue.

Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, despite its justifiable criticism of the peace process, seems at the protagonist’s personal level to ignore the question: how does one justify the past in light of the present? This then might allow for the text to be read as an apologia for the perpetrator’s active involvement. Indeed, the protagonist tells his story to make his pasts livable in the present, which has been claimed a phenomenon common to former “combatants” (O’Neill 2008, 8). Even though it has been suggested that the fact that killing off the IRA perpetrators represents the need to get rid of the past, such an approach to the legacy of the past is rather short-sighted, to say the least, as it does not allow neither the avenger nor the avenged to resolve their problem: the avenger and the survivors of the victims may be able to process trauma but it is not possible for them to “erase” the experience of it as such. Consequently, owing to its ambiguous, almost positive perspective of the protagonist’s actions, The Twelve, is actually also in danger of (re)inscribing violence into the post-conflict discourse. This is a particularly interesting point to ponder as it refers back to the claim that stock characters and predictable outcome resultant from the generic structure of the thriller established Northern Ireland as a place doomed to destruction; chiefly so as thriller as well as crime fiction are currently becoming quite prominent literary means in Northern Irish fiction. Although the contemporary works are more accurate in depicting the conflict in greater complexity than those early examples of Troubles fiction, which makes them closer to reality, they still tend to privilege certain elements, often bringing the issue to the verge of partiality. Therefore, it is necessary that the readers should make sure they, using words of an infamous sleuth, make a good use of their “little grey cells” to recognize what the limits of a monologic discourse are.

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol.1. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Bowyer-Bell, John. 1978. “The Troubles as Trash.” Hibernia 20: 22.

Brannigan, John. 2005. “Northern Irish Fiction: Provisionals and Pataphysicians.” In A Concise Companion to British Fiction, edited by John English, 141–63. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cleary, Joe. 1996. “‘Fork-tongued on the Border Bit’: Partition and the Politics of Form in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1: 227–76.

Hughes, Eamonn, ed. 1991. Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, 1960–1990. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Kelly, Aaron. 2005. The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Kennedy, Maev. 2005. “The Trouble with Fictional Troubles.” Guardian, June 2. Accessed April 12, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/02/hayfestival2005. northernireland.

Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. 2003. Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (De-)constructing the North. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

Lodge, Tom. 2009. “Northern Ireland: Between Peace and Reconciliation.” openDemocracy. Accessed April 13, 2014. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/northern-ireland-between-peace-and-reconciliation.

Magee, Patrick. 2001. Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in ‘Troubles Fiction.’ Belfast: Beyond the Pale.

McEldowney, Eugene. 1997. “Hearts of Gold, Bullets of Lead.” Review of The Wrong Man by Danny Morrison. Irish Times, March 28.

McMinn, Joseph. 1980. “Contemporary Novels on the Troubles.” Études Irlandaises 5: 113–21.

Morrison, Danny. 2001. Foreword to Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in ‘Troubles Fiction’ by Patrick Magee, v–vii. Belfast: Beyond the Pale.

———. 2005. “The Enemy within.” Accessed April 12, 20014. http://www.dannymorrison. com/wp-content/dannymorrisonarchive/180.htm

———. 1997. The Wrong Man. Dublin: Mercier Press.

Neill, William J.V., Fitzsimons, Diana S., and Brendan Murtagh. 1995. Reimaging the Pariah City: Urban Development in Belfast and Detroit. Aldershot: Avebury.

Neville, Stuart. 2009. The Twelve. London: Harvill Secker.

O’Neill, Kathleen. 2008. “The Stories They Tell: Former Prisoner Ex Combatants on Putting Down Their Guns.” Quest 7: 4–19.

Sansom, Ian. 2009. “Hard Men and Hard Truths in Modern Belfast.” Review of The Twelve by Stuart Neville. The Irish Times, July 25.

Schwab, Gabrielle. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smyth, Gerry. 1997. The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction. London: Pluto Press.

Stasio, Marilyn. 2009. “The Death’s Hit Man.” Review of The Twelve by Stuart Neville. The New York Times, November 13, Sunday Book Review. Accessed April 10, 20014.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Crime-t.html?_r=1.

Titley, Alan. 1980. “Rough Rug-headed Kerns: The Irish Gunman in the Popular Novel.” Éire-Ireland 15.4: 15–38.

THE VISION OF PROLIFERATING CRIME IN IAIN BANKS’S FICTION

MARTINA VRÁNOVÁ

Crime is an omnipresent phenomenon in Iain Banks’s fiction. Yet scholarly reception of his works has not treated crime as a separate issue. Out of his numerous writings, four mainstream novels, The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), Canal Dreams (1989), A Song of Stone (1997), will be the subjects of this analysis and will be put into logical, not chronological, sequence in order to illustrate what I call the vision of proliferating crime. These novels paint a clear picture of crime as it gradually seizes all areas of society. I will first define crime as restricting another person’s freedom which will allow me to put the four Banks’s novels in a continuum with rising potency and presence of crime. Banks’s vision of crime is that of an unpunishable, enduring and self-perpetuating force which, however, resides within human beings and finally controls all levels of society. Crime in this sequence starts on interpersonal and familial levels, and spreads out into all social structures. No matter how the representatives of detectives or justice in Banks’s books try, crime cannot be eliminated; it only breeds more crime.

The critical reception of Banks’s fiction largely ignores the issue of crime. The majority of literary research concentrates on the following topics: Banks’s liberal political agenda and anti-war conviction, particularly as far as his Culture novels are concerned; exploration of the Scottish identity; crisis of masculinity, sexuality and brutality, particularly in The Wasp Factory; and the features of the Gothic in his fiction.[25] One of the few representatives of the investigation of crime in his novels is Katarzyna Pisarska’s article “Search of a Formula” (2008) in which she considers Complicity a modern noir thriller. A possible explanation is that none of Banks’s novels may unequivocally be labeled detective or crime fiction. They show the “blurring between fiction genres” as a significant trend of contemporary fiction, which John Charles and his colleagues  accentuate in their genre guide to mystery (2012, 81). Even though the inspected novels are far from pure as far as the genre is concerned, Banks still uses various features of crime fiction to investigate the generally destructive nature of crime.

The Crow Road is generally recognized as a coming-of-age novel in which the main character, Prentice McHoan, reaches maturity and comes to terms with his father’s view of life, yet some critics have noticed that the novel “masquerades as a comfortably sequential Bildungsroman” (Morton 1992, 37). Whether a pretense or not, The Crow Road is also a crime mystery. Prentice McHoan is an amateur sleuth who solves murders within his own family committed by his uncle Fergus Urvill. Based on Charles’s characterization, The Crow Road complies with the amateur sleuth subgenre of the detective novel. The two major features are that the sleuth “must have some compelling reason for becoming involved in an investigation” and that “the murderer usually comes from within a closed circle of suspects” (Charles et al. 2012, 19, 20). The family setting of The Crow Road justifies both criteria.

Complicity also demonstrates “the elasticity of the genre [of the crime novel] and extent to which it has become a key form for novelists interested in writing socially committed, and more or less realist fiction” (Williams 1993, 41). It is a novel with a strong anti-tory political agenda, yet it is closest to crime fiction among Banks’s writings. Cameron Colley, a Gonzo hack for an Edinburgh newspaper Caledonian, gets tips for cases from an anonymous mole Mr Archer, who sends Cameron all around Scotland to wait at phone booths for more information. While Cameron does that, his childhood friend Andy, aka Mr Archer, murders prominent political and business figures who are guilty of corruption or crimes against humanity but escaped legal punishment. Cameron is then the prime police suspect as he wrote about these public figures and suggested in his columns that they should be given “taste of their own medicine” (Banks 1993, 108). In his survey of the theories of crime fiction, John Scaggs draws on several theorists and characterizes the crime thriller as focusing on the crime rather than the investigation, escalating in danger and violence, emphasizing a present crime rather than past, based on psychology of characters, and as having a radical social perspective questioning society, law or justice (2005, 107–08). All these characteristics of the crime thriller may fitfully be applied to Complicity. The same train of thought is followed by Katarzyna Pisarska. In addition, she adds the attribute of noir to the thriller. Pisarska relies on Lee Horsley’s definition of noir which is in literature manifested by “i) the subjective point of view; ii) the shifting roles of the protagonist; iii) the ill-fated relationship between the protagonist and society (generating the themes of alienation and entrapment); and iv) the ways in which noir functions as a socio-political critique” (2008, 151). The subjective point of view is a major feature of Complicity as Cameron’s and Andy’s narratives are juxtaposed throughout the book. The main protagonist shifts his roles from an investigator, to a suspect and finally to a victim. Both Cameron and Andy suffer their own kinds of alienation and entrapment—Cameron in drugs and computer games, and Andy in his own mutilated sense of social responsibility and also geographically in a removed decrepit hotel he lives in. Finally, the sociopolitical critique in the form of an attack on illegal Establishment practices is the core of the novel. Thus, Complicity’s genre apparently revolves around the ever-present center of crime.

Within my choice of Banks’s novels there is another thriller. Canal Dreams is a power-politics thriller in Graham Greene’s style. Hisako Onoda, a top cello player in the Japanese orchestra, travels to Europe to teach and tour. Scared of flying, she travels by ship from Japan through the Panama Canal. Hers and other two cargo ships get stuck in one of the lakes of the Canal because of the local civil war. The guerrilla fighters abduct the ships’ crews and passengers. Having found out that the whole abduction is orchestrated by the US through an insider agent, Hisako launches a violent Bruce Willis style revenge on the venceristas and their American leader. So far the outline of Canal Dreams fits the definition of the anti-conspiracy thriller in which “the protagonist is pitched against a powerful conspiracy without recourse to the forces of law and order” (Scaggs 2005, 117). Not only is Canal Dreams an anti-conspiracy thriller with a political agenda, it is also a psychological thriller as Hisako works her way to finding terms with her own troubled past of a murderer.

Finally, A Song of Stone is primarily a postapocalyptic vision and a “philosophical exploration of the dehumanizing potential of armed conflict” (Review of A Song of Stone 1998, 73). Abel and his lover, local aristocrats in an unnamed country ruined by war, are stopped by a party of what is left of a band of soldiers with a woman lieutenant Loot and made to return to their castle with them. Not only does the castle become the soldiers’ fort, it is also a witness to multiple crimes committed by virtually everybody in the story. Banks’s anti-war conviction is indeed the driving force of the novel, yet the omnipresence of crime and “the disintegration of social and ideological structures” makes it worth considering as a culmination of Banks’s obsession with crime (Page 1997, 32). As illustrated in this brief genre study digression, none of Banks’s novels may straightforwardly be labeled a crime novel, yet crime, in its various and often multiple forms, is present in all of them.

Before dealing with the interpretation of the individual novels, let me focus on the definition of crime that I find fitting for Banks’s fiction. In Banks’s novels crime is considered a feature of human beings. It is not an abstract notion existing outside individuals to which people fall prey. Crime comes into existence only in interpersonal interaction. It may be understood as an act of restriction of other people’s freedom. Moreover, in the sequence of novels I have chosen, crime has an escalating tendency. It spreads in volume, gravity and effect from strictly interpersonal levels into larger ones so that it finally encompasses all social and political aspects. In a significant study by moral and political philosophers and social scientists Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (2001), Sergio Pérez proposes a definition of evil that easily involves what I attempt to label crime:

[E]vil is noncontrolled inhumanity manifesting itself individually, socially, or politically. By defining it as noncontrolled inhumanity, we want to stress the fact that we do not consider evil as a theological issue […] We are talking about evil caused by human beings, guided by decisions, and carried out against beings or against something meaningful to human beings. Consequently, evil is an act which involves human beings as subjects and objects. From this viewpoint—indeed limited—evil has nothing to do with the negation of the divine or of nature, but the negation of what is specifically human caused by the behavior of human beings themselves. (2001, 189–90)

Iain Banks’s secular view of the world defies any existence of a higher agency, no matter whether good or bad. The anti-religious attitude to life is articulated by Kenneth McHoan, Prentice’s father, in The Crow Road. Like many young adults, Prentice is attracted to the idea of a higher meaning to life. When he grieves for his friend Darren Watt who was killed in a car accident, Kenneth lays his secularism plain to his son: “‘Prentice, I’m sorry. Maybe it sounds brutal, but that’s just the way it is. Consciousness … goodness, whatever; they haven’t got any momentum. They can stop in an instant, just snuffed out. It happens all the time; it’s happening right now, all over the world; and Darren was hardly an extreme example of life’s injustice, death’s injustice’” (Banks 1994, 145). There is no higher consciousness ruling people’s lives or giving them meaning. The only agency that can do so are human beings themselves. Analogically, there is no other notion of evil or crime than the one which resides within human beings and that people themselves are capable of. As such, crime originates only in an interpersonal interaction. Crime is a manifestation of a desire of power where a human subject restricts the freedom of a human object. Pérez thus calls evil an act of sovereignty: “Anchored in freedom, the criminal perceives the choice of evil as an act of sovereignty. By ‘sovereignty’ we mean the capacity to overlook the laws of preserving the continuity of life, in a state of complete indifference toward death” (2001, 191). When, in The Crow Road, Uncle Fergus kills his brother-in-law Rory and his own wife Fiona, he assumes power over their lives. When, in Complicity, Judge Jamieson denies that prostitutes may have been raped, he asserts the rapists’ sovereignty over the women’s lives. When, in Canal Dreams, the venceristas take hostages, they usurp control over their lives. When, in A Song of Stone, Loot takes over Abel and Morgan’s castle, she becomes the master not only of the building itself, but also of its inhabitants and the farmers taking shelter and looking for protection near it. These are but a few examples of Banks’s fictional crimes manifesting themselves as acts of sovereignty.

A similar view of the interpersonal nature of crime is offered by Alistair Braidwood who in his doctoral thesis examines Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of the engaged writer and finds its example in Iain Banks. Discussing Banks’s moral engagement, he cannot avoid Sartre’s idea of morality whose central idea is that “‘one man’s freedom’ depends on the freedom of other individuals” (Braidwood 2011, 85). This interdependence of individuals’ freedoms is indeed interpersonal and limiting it becomes crime. Braidwood also notices that in Banks’s fiction “the ethical and the political are deeply intertwined” (2011, 57). The ethical never stays on the level of an individual. By having an interpersonal nature, it immediately becomes social and the more individuals it concerns, the more political it becomes. Banks’s fiction ultimately strives at the moral criticism of social, political or otherwise global levels. Banks delivers his “vision of morality as criticism of the state, whether Scottish, British, ‘Western’, or ‘Global’” (Braidwood 2011, 57). Even though crime starts at the lowest interpersonal level, it quickly spreads and floods the society, which is also the idea I mean to prove further on.

As mentioned above, The Crow Road seems to comply with most criteria of a crime mystery, especially with that of an amateur sleuth in the role of a detective. Crime in the novel is on the lowest, interpersonal, level and happens in the family. An amateur detective, Prentice McHoan, is set against a family criminal, Uncle Fergus Urvill. The mystery is not only whodunit, but also howdunit and primarily whydunit. The McHoan family resides in the town of Gallanach. At the beginning of the story three members of the family are dead. Margot, Prentice’s grandmother, is just being buried, Fiona Urvill, Prentice’s aunt, died more than ten years ago in a car accident and Rory McHoan, Prentice’s uncle and Fiona’s brother, has been missing for about ten years. Only Grandma Margot died a non-violent death. Even though the readers are spared the details of murders as The Crow Road is characterized by “a notable softening of the baroque violence” characteristic of Bank’s previous novels such as The Wasp Factory, death seems omnipresent in the town of Gallanach (Morton 1992, 37). As MacDonald notes “Prentice McHoan’s Highland homeland is a liminal territory, somewhere between past and present, death and life, and is the location of various damaging and haunting family secrets” (2012, 38). Further on, Prentice’s friend Darren Watt dies in a car crash and also Prentice’s father is killed in a storm. However, it is Fiona’s and Rory’s deaths that the murder mystery and family secret reside in. The mystery starts to unwind when Prentice is given a draft of his uncle Rory’s literary piece titled Crow Road. His detective work starts by interpreting Rory’s notes as they are only abbreviations resembling shorthand writing. Prentice comes to believe that Rory was killed by Fergus because, first, Fergus confined a secret of his wife’s infidelity to him, second, Rory figured out that Fergus killed his wife in what he claimed to be a car accident, and third, because Rory wanted to use this in his prospective book. It is now up to Prentice to prove that his theory is correct, to identify the criminal and thus reestablish an order that has been upset. The official system of law enforcement and justice is left out of the question as both crimes happened about ten years ago and Prentice has no evidence. To obtain it, Prentice’s role must change from a sleuth to a provocateur. His only chance is to provoke Fergus to more action by accusing him of Fiona’s and Rory’s murders. Prentice is partially successful as somebody, very probably Fergus, breaks into the McHoans’ house in order to steal Rory’s papers and burn the house down including all resident McHoans in it. The robber remains unrecognized though. Soon, however, Fergus crashes his small Cessna plane and dies in it. There are two possibilities—either Fergus had a heart attack, which means that he was innocent, or Prentice was successful in raising guilty conscience in Fergus who then committed suicide.

The Crow Road constitutes the beginning of my continuum of crime as it is the closest to the classical detective story in the identification of the disruptive threat to order and an effort to reestablish it. John Scaggs characterizes the Golden Age of detective fiction by its “central fear […] the threat of social disruption comes from within” (2005, 47). In the same way, the threat in The Crow Road comes from within the McHoan family. However, Banks moves on and makes the disruptive threat of order rather trivial, thus waiting for every human being to trip. Fergus’s motives for his crimes are not planned initially—they are momentary weaknesses and passions. Rory has to die because of a moment of “casually misplaced trust” (Banks 1994, 131). When spending a night in a hunting lodge, drunk and high on marijuana, Fergus has a sudden emotional moment and tells Rory about how he saw his wife cheating on him: “Fergus Urvill was crying like a baby […] Rory cuddled him” (Banks 1994, 211, italics in original). In a similar way, Fiona’s murder is also a matter of an instant and of heightened emotions. Going home at night from a party, Fiona is furious, keeps reproaching Fergus for being too familiar with another woman and accuses him of infidelity. In that instantaneous rage, Fergus drives off the road and clicks off his wife’s seat belt. Later on he claims not to remember the last few miles of the journey. The motivation for these two crimes did not originally involve a plan. They were matters of a sudden blank of mind, which in raised emotions may happen to anybody, and that is the threat from within. Such moments are even more dangerous because they breed more planned-ahead crime and also a sophisticated criminal when Fergus tries to steal Rory’s papers and burn the McHoans in their house. By elevating crime from a pure incident to a plan Banks makes it a real threat to society.

Yet this novel is as close to reestablishing order after a crime as possible. Scaggs states that the Golden Age detective fiction involves “the ideological motivation to recover, or return to, a previous period characterised by stability and order” (2005, 48). What keeps reassuring the reader that order will be reestablished is Prentice’s sense of duty and perseverance to uncover the crimes. Even though Prentice loses some of Rory’s papers on the train, the idea of an unfinished issue haunts him: “Even now, months later, I had dreams about reading a book that ended half-way through, or watching a film which ended abruptly, screen whiting-out” (Banks 1994, 262). Prentice’s striving to untie the knot of his family’s mystery comes to a tentative end with Fergus’s death. In his last will Fergus leaves one of his cars and specifically its contents to Prentice. In the glove compartment Prentice finds a glass paperweight whose spherical shape then fits the wound on Rory’s skull when his body is finally discovered, very probably as a result of an anonymous tip to the police from Fergus himself, in one of the local lochs. What is more, Prentice preserves the integrity of his family by never telling any member of his suspicions and investigation. At Fergus’s funeral he fights an urge to shout the truth out:

It was all I could do to stand there, moving my mouth when people sang, and looking down at my feet when they prayed, and not shout out some profanity, some blasphemy, or, even worse, the truth. I actually gathered the breath in my lungs at one point, hardly able to bear the pressure of fury inside me any longer. I tensed my belly for the shout: Killer! Fucking MURDERER! […] but the singing went on undisturbed. (Banks 1994, 479)

The family peace is also kept and its continuation secured by a birth of a newborn—Prentice’s brother’s son named after their father Kenneth. This ending poses contrast to the beginning of the novel when the McHoan family is on the road to dying out. Nonetheless, Banks does not shut all the doors to the subversiveness of crime. Prentice is only partially successful as a sleuth as all his evidence is circumstantial. The character permanently questions the soundness of the evidence he gets and then keeps persuading himself of his success. Prentice is so hungry for hard evidence that he keeps questioning facts and also people all the way to the end of the book. By not being able to obtain absolute certainty of Fergus’s guilt, Prentice’s detective efforts are undermined as crime seems to be slipping away in between his fingers.

In Complicity, the genre of thriller takes over from the murder mystery. As such, Complicity moves away from the reestablishment of order but rather stresses the lasting effects of a change introduced by crime. Banks presents two ways of fighting crime, none of which, though, reinstalls previous order or justice. Unlike the detective mystery of a classical kind, the thriller does not necessarily propose a way to reestablish social order at its end. Rather the opposite seems more common as Scaggs notes: “In this respect there are […] certain parallels with the Gothic novel, whose focus on the notion of evil and villainy finds its twentieth-century manifestation in the crime thriller’s overriding concern with criminality, its causes, and its aftermath” (2005, 107). The frequent literary association of Banks’s fiction with the Gothic provides a parallel here too. Both in the Gothic and in the crime thriller, crime does not only undermine order but also prevents the scales of justice from reassuming their balance. Neither of the two genres’ endings reassure readers that justice or previous order may be attained. Rather the opposite—a change installed by crime has lasting effects. Where in The Crow Road the system of law enforcement is ineffective and cannot be relied on as far as the identification of the criminal is concerned, in Complicity the political and the judicial systems are the culprits themselves, which is where the impossibility of reestablishing order lies. It has been noted that Complicity is a political novel with anti-Conservative agenda, reflecting the political situation of Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. David Leishman states that the novel is an “all-out attack on the values or Thatcherism” (2009, 219). Alan MacGillivray also notes that the novel does not only “describe in vivid detail a number of sadistic murders and attacks on prominent members of the Establishment, it is the most specifically political of Banks’s novels dealing with contemporary issues and events from an outspokenly anti-Tory viewpoint” (1996, n.p.). I would like to point out the danger of generalization and sweeping statements—not all Tories are ruthless, selfish and materialistic entrepreneurs and not all Liberals are humanistic, charity-loving intellectuals. Indeed, each of Banks’s two protagonists belongs to one of these two movements—Cameron is a liberal fighting the Establishment with journalism and Andy, even though killing prominent Tories, was a successful businessman himself and has always voted Conservative—yet neither of them, not even liberal Cameron, presents a successful way to reform the corrupt system. Rather than delving into political differences I mean to concentrate on the connection between power and crime. In the definition of crime I have stated that what makes a human being perform a criminal act is a desire for sovereignty. What Banks implies in this novel is that power itself constitutes a predisposition for crime as the individual in power desires more of it. We seem to have stumbled upon a vicious circle—desire for power, crime, power, desire for more power, crime and so on and so forth. The desire for sovereignty and power is the background upon which crime breeds and by which it spreads and multiplies. This is the problem that the novel poses. The murdered prominent politicians and businessmen had so much power that they did not flinch from abusing it and from criminal acts in order to reassert it over other people or to get more of it.

Such an abuse of power is definitely a legitimate cause to fight against. In Complicity and other novels an “individual is fighting to change not only their own situation, but that of those around them. Although not always to the fore in his novels, the bigger questions of politics, religion and morality are always present. Banks reveals, in his writing, what he sees as important, and wants change by making others aware” (Braidwood 2011, 81). Banks makes his readers aware of the crimes of the Establishment by having his two main characters fight them, yet by different means. Cameron Coley fashions himself to be a follower of Hunter S. Thompson and investigates political and other public affairs. One of his articles addresses the criminal activities of the not yet murdered men:

“Perhaps, […] somebody should make one of these programmes for those of us who’re fed up seeing the usual suspects get theirs (corrupt landlords, substance-abusing youths and of course the inevitable drug dealers; reprehensible villains all, no doubt, but too predictable, too safe) and introduce a Real Avenger, a Radical Equaliser who’ll take on some alternative hate-figures. Somebody […] who’ll attack the asset strippers and the arms smugglers” (Banks 1993, 108)

Cameron definitely raises public awareness of these issues by his journalism but personally he is unaffected. In his everyday life he is immersed in vain playing computer games and having S-n-M sex with his friend’s wife. Moreover, Cameron, both in his professional and personal life, is described as a coward. After a lot of begging to be given a chance to become a war correspondent,  he is sent to Basra where, when faced with the war horror, he is unable to report. He describes the incident as “the time of my failure and my simple, shaming incapacity to reap and work the obvious power of what I was observing; the place that exposed my incompetence, my hopeless inability to witness” (Banks 1993, 290). Also Andy, his childhood friend and the murderer, blames Cameron for letting him down twice. At the age of four Cameron runs away when Andy falls into an iced-over lake and as a teenager he runs away again when Andy is being raped by a stranger in the woods. This is possibly an exaggerated conviction on Andy’s part, considering the fact that these two instances happened when they were children and young adolescents, but still a personality feature that is presented as a building stone for the character’s evaluation. In addition to that, Cameron is himself convinced he is a coward unlike Andy who is the “physically capable” one (Banks 1993, 142). Cameron’s character presents no culmination, no reform, no solution. The character ends up nursing his lung cancer, keeping on smoking and using drugs. Braidwood notes that “[w]hat makes Complicity different from Banks’ other novels is that Cameron finishes the novel as disillusioned as when we first meet him. Wiser perhaps, but not happier” (2011, 52). I do agree with Braidwood that Cameron’s character undergoes no progress, however, what I disagree with and what I try to prove by the inspection of the novels in question is that the disillusionment and inability to fight crime is not confined to this novel only. In The Crow Road Prentice wants to believe he provoked Fergus to suicide but cannot be sure that his crimes were avenged by his death. In this novel Cameron simply does not venture into doing anything more about the corrupt political and social system than he used to. Crime is left untouched and free to proliferate.

In contrast to Cameron’s passive response, Banks also offers an active response, nevertheless, also misguided. Andy, relying on his sad personal experience—of rape, of his Commanding Officer letting a lot of soldiers die in the Falklands because of his incompetence, of a local doctor letting his sister die because he was more interested in fishing than in his patients—is Cameron’s Radical Avenger who murders those he finds guilty. Braidwood summarizes the difference between Cameron and Andy: There is “a psychological difference between someone who may fantasise about committing such acts, and someone who really acts. The one who only fantasises has an intact moral sense that such actions are wrong and they remain fantasies, the one who makes these fantasies reality has to convince himself that his or her actions are warranted. They have to act in bad faith to be able to justify their actions” (2011, 44). Andy nurses an idea of social responsibility and he acts upon it. He carefully plans his actions, which is shown in those parts of the novel which are written as a second-person narrative. These parts are Andy’s descriptions of his brutal murders; they are instructions to himself. This well-planned and intelligent design of murders and the sophisticated set-up of Cameron as a suspect makes Andy what Pérez calls a major offender:

The nature of major offenders can be deviated, but is it far from stupid. This is because evil, in order to be carried out, requires a certain intelligence. […] One must know the other person very well in order to make him suffer, in order to figure out the verbal and physical abuse which might deeply wound the victim’s nature. Certainly, passion might also lead to a lack of humanity. However, evil is worse when impassionate, and the criminal more hateful when he carries out his offenses without the alibi of passion. (2001, 192)

Andy’s crimes are brutal indeed. They are set up so that the culprits’ punishment fits their offense, however, he is not altogether free from passion. By passion I do not mean that he commits crimes of passion, his actions are a perfectionist’s plans, but a conviction he firmly, even passionately, believes in. Andy nurses an idea that all people have social responsibility to reinstall justice and punish the unjust ones: “We all have moral responsibility, whether we like it or not, but people in power—in the military, in politics, in professions, whatever—have an imperative to care, or at least to exhibit an officially acceptable analogue of care; duty, I suppose.  It was people I knew had abused that responsibility that I attacked; that’s what I was taking as my … authority” (Banks 1993, 297). This is the reason why Andy kills those he finds guilty. Yet the murders are not only a punishment of the corrupt Establishment or revenge on Cameron for betraying him twice. They are also a lesson to Cameron to stand up to this responsibility. Nevertheless, if we consider the issues of crime, justice and punishment, there is a sudden twist. By putting himself into the role of a righteous avenger, Andy becomes one of those he despises. He says it himself, possibly without understanding all the consequences: “‘So,’ he says, ‘in that climate of culpability, that perversion of moral values, nothing, nothing I have done has been out of place or out of order or wrong’” (Banks 1993, 301). Now he deserves to be punished himself. Crime, even in the form of punishment, begets more crime. We have come up against a conundrum. The systems of justice and politics are corrupt; they no longer provide institutional protection against crime. Punishing criminals seems wrong as the avenger is downgraded onto the level of the criminal. By inactivity we all become accomplices of the criminals. What is there to be done against crime? Banks does not seem to provide an answer to that. Complicity poses more questions than answers.

On an escalating level, Banks’s Canal Dreams is a novel where crime is present on interpersonal and political levels, spreading further on into international relations. In addition, crime in this novel is sanctified by international political institutions that, by definition, should stand against it. Alan MacGilivray opines that after Hisako is taken hostage, witnesses murders of her companions and is raped by the guerilla fighters, the “climax of the book deals with her gruesome and apocalyptic revenge on her abusers. There is no doubt Banks was catching the trend for exploitative fiction on the rape revenge theme” (1996, n.p.). I dare say that such an evaluation of Canal Dreams is rather simplistic. David Leishman assumes a larger point of view in order to characterize the novel as “geopolitical intrigue” (2009, 219). Both evaluations are definitely true, yet Canal Dreams offers much more. It is a study of crime on various levels understood as violent usurpation of control, power and sovereignty over other subjects. Through Hisako reading the history of the area, Banks introduces the Isthmus of Panama to the reader as a place of great strategic importance and thus a site of permanent battles, wars and looting—simply crime with the sole purpose of gaining power by capturing a strategic piece of land. Banks spends pages 27 to 31 narrating the history of the territory. He starts with the conquistadors, then he moves on to the political and military control by the US, the establishment of the independent state of Panama, the atrocities of the Panama Canal construction and finishes with the Torrijos–Carter Treaties coming to an end as the second millennium closes in. The Isthmus of Panama is set in a role of a precious gem that keeps being stolen and passing owners.

However, officially aspiring at global peace, the system of international politics cannot admit being involved in a state of war. One of the most frequently used ways to eliminate crime is to make it legal, which is in this situation accompanied by the old-fashioned but ever so reliable game of wordplay. Hisako, much like most public, falls prey to calling a war “a local dispute,” “a police operation” and “a rescue mission” (Banks 1990, 12). The political system and its representatives mask their criminal activities by giving them different names and diminutives which in effect legalize political crime. The legalization of crime as part of propaganda is also successful in persuading the public of crime being justifiable in what is claimed to be an emergency situation. Among the passengers kept hostage there is Mr Mandamus from Egypt. Coming from an environment frequently seized by political crime, he tries to apply rules to it. He thinks of crime, such as hijacking ships and taking hostages, as a regular, even righteous way of negotiation. It is a negotiation strategy with its own clearly set rules: “They haven’t said they will kill others if one tries to escape, but I think one has to assume this is implied. We live in an age where the etiquette of sieges and hostage-taking has become—as one might say—public domain. They assume that we know the rules. I think we have to test these assumptions before we make any hasty moves” (Banks 1990, 102, italics in original). By admitting the righteousness of crime, it is becoming part of the system of political negotiation and stops being set against it. Assuming its legitimacy, it ceases to be crime.

Higher political bodies, like states and governments, are supposed to be safeguards against crime. The novel, however, portrays these bodies failing to be so and turning against their own people, using them as instruments in their unquenchable thirst for more power. The situation the hostages are in is not what they considered it to be at the beginning. The People’s Liberation Front of Panamá are not simply fighting their own local civil war. The CIA infiltrated them in the person of their jefe, Earl Dandridge, so that under his command a plane with a US representative Buckman, who will be flying over Gatún Lake to a peace conference in Salinas, may be shot down. The crash is expected to be blamed on the local venceristas and thus considered an act of war against the US. The US thus provoke a war against themselves by sacrificing innocent people like Hisako only to be able to get another chance at ruling over the Panama Canal. The end of the millennium is getting closer and the US have to secure their control and, by any means necessary, render the Torrijos–Carter Treaties invalid. Hisako nurses foolish hope that the hostages will be saved until she meets Dandridge and realizes the twisted nature of the situation. Only then does she refuse being a naive, obedient subject of international politics and, indeed, a casualty of a higher cause. Scaggs in his survey of the crime fiction theory identifies the pattern of the anti-conspiracy thriller based on Marty Roth: “In Roth’s outline, there are two worlds in detective fiction. One of these is the world as it seems, and as we would like it to be. The other is the world that is revealed when the thin veneer of civilisation is removed, and, according to Roth, the first form of this world of crime fiction, the world as it really is when the façade is stripped away, is a conspiratorial world, intent on disrupting the order of the ordinary world” (2005, 118). When the façade is stripped, Hisako realizes there is no recourse to order as the safeguards do not provide safety anymore. The safeguards of global peace, the bodies of international politics, are criminals themselves.

It is the sudden realization of the absurdity and total hopelessness of the situation that makes Hisako act and fight Dandridge’s venceristas on her own.[26] The absurdity frees her to do things she has hardly ever dreamed of. She becomes a stone-cold pro with a Kalashnikov from action movies. Her fight is, however, rather limited. She fights in order to save her own life. She does not kill the venceristas who raped her out of revenge as by now she cannot feel any pain, physical or emotional. As the character notes herself, “revenge could taste remarkably bland when you’d stopped feeling” (Banks 1990, 220). Having nothing but one’s bare life, the only two choices one has left are either retain humanity and become a victim, or shake off all human feelings and become an efficient killing machine. Hisako chooses the other for one more reason than just saving herself. She decides to get rid of Dandrige so that the plane with the US representative can safely fly over Gatún Lake, even though she is aware of the fact that this act of hers is not going to change the global situation and will remain an isolated, desperate and vain attempt at reestablishing order: “She decided to go and see Mr Dandridge, who deserved a visit like nobody else did. It was all still hopeless, she knew, but this was better than doing nothing” (Banks 1990, 220–21). In spite of being successful and having Gatún Lake blow up in a blazing fire from an oil tanker, Hisako knows she did not really change anything. There is no recourse to order, only more crime by unrestrained authorities. One heroic stand against crime is too weak to destroy it, especially when it has spread into the international level.

The last piece in my sequence of Iain Banks’s novels, A Song of Stone, presents a bleak view of the world in which all safeguards, like government, law or justice, no longer exist. The only means of survival is crime. Banks’s postapocalyptic vision is that of a world after a war conflict which remains unresolved. There are no winners and no losers, no leaders and no morals. Despite her unfavorable review of the novel, Amanda Craig states an indisputable fact about Banks’s fiction: “Upsetting the reader’s sensibilities has been this author’s trademark since his debut with The Wasp Factory” (1997, 47). A Song of Stone only reinforces this tradition. It presents a vision of omnipresent violent crime, endless suffering and no respect for human life. If I follow my train of thought, in Complicity and more evidently in Canal Dreams political crime penetrated both the national and the international spheres. In addition, in Complicity, based on Andy’s example, crime corrupts and destroys the ones who commit it no matter whether their underlying intentions are good or bad. This destructive feature of crime is the basis for Banks’s postapocalyptic view of society in A Song of Stone. The proliferation of crime has destroyed all social structures that secure the existence of human society as a functioning whole. Like a viral infection, as crime expands, it also transforms everything into chaos. Vincenzo Ruggiero in his study of political violence also comes to the conclusion that without common structures of power the final result is chaos:

Living without a common authority, an artificial power “to keep them all in awe”, humans are in a constant condition of war, “and such a war is of every man against every man”. This original violence characterizing human interactions in the absence of an artificial power, although dysfunctional, is not immoral or unjust, because the very notions of justice and injustice, of right and wrong, can hardly take shape where there is no common power. This is because notions of right and wrong “relate to men in society, not in solitude”. (2006, 11)

If values are not shared, but quest for power remains, then mayhem is to be got. The last bits of civilization remain only where some order, no matter whether morally right or wrong, remains, and that is in the castle. The castle is the last siege of social structure where people have their roles, where there is a line between the powerful in command and the powerless who serve them. However, with Loot’s army’s entrance even the castle is to fall victim to the surrounding chaos. The chaos induced by the proliferation of crime is evident in a description of the state the castle is in after a wild celebration when the soldiers succeeded in getting their enemy army’s cannon. The description is that of a crime scene: “In the lower hall, lit by the last few fitful stumps of candles, something like a massacre is tableau’d. Bodies, littered, lie; wine pools, dark as blood. Only a snort and something muttered deep in sleep witnesses that the scene is one of torpor rather than murder” (Banks 1998, 207). Nevertheless, this world ruled by crime embodies a paradox. The more crime there is, the less it is crime. In a world where the only means of negotiation or interpersonal interaction is crime, people are not even aware of being criminals as there is no opposite to compare crime to. When considering major offenders, Sergio Pérez states that their choice of committing crime, of doing evil, is a sort of rebelliousness: “[I]n order for rebelliousness to be authentic and to entail a risk, something must exist against which one can rebel—this something is the existence of rules” (2001, 190). In the novel looters steal, soldiers take hostages and kill, human life has no value. Yet everything is only a matter of survival, no crime is involved. If there are no artificial structures of power issuing rules based on the notion of good (or public good which is shared), there is no crime either.

The only check, even though quite weakened by his own immoral actions and crimes, against which the reader may evaluate the situation as criminal is Abel, the narrator. Abel is no angel. His sense of morality is corrupted particularly when it comes to sexuality. He is engaged in an incestuous relationship with his sister Morgan and also reminisces about other perverse sexual experimentation, yet he seems to be in a similar situation like Cameron in Complicity. His relationship with Morgan by no means limits her own freedom, it is a matter of mutual agreement just like Cameron’s violent sexual relationship to Yvonne. His transgressions have been against laws and morality but not against other people’s freedom. Abel’s and Morgan’s transgressions left them isolated in their castle as other people did not want to have anything to do with them but no crime was committed: “So much have we done with the body—our own and others—that by now there are no prohibitions left to ignore, no sanctity still to defile or sanctions remaining to be broken. We have stopped at unfeigned rape, unwilling torture and actual murder, but acted out these all, embraced great pains and courted death through sweet constriction many times” (Banks 1998, 209).  Abel’s inability to commit crime, based on the above-mentioned definition, is shown further on in the novel when he is taken out of the castle to be killed, yet things go wrong for Loot and her killing party. They are ambushed by their enemies, most of the soldiers are killed and Loot is herself wounded. Abel finds Loot in an abandoned windmill only half-conscious, yet he cannot bring himself to shooting her. In his thoughts he summarizes his moral dilemma—he can either join the majority and become a murderer, or resist the system of crime and be a victim. There is nothing in between to save one’s face:

The tolerance I’ve exhibited and felt towards our lieutenant has been a relic of more civilised times […] I thought, through a display of civility, to show my contempt for these desperate days and our lieutenant’s brash assumptions, but forced beyond a certain point, such politeness becomes self-defeating. I must allow myself to be infected by the violent nature of the times, to suck in their contaminating breath, take on their fatal contagion. I look at the gun in my hand. Still, this is the lieutenant’s way. To kill her with the weapon she might have used to kill me might be poetic—just or not—but it seems like too easy a rhyme to me. (Banks 1998, 247)

The remnants of civility in him do not let him murder another human being or even put Loot down like an animal. That is the reason why he is about to end up just like Cameron—because his humanity prevents him from taking revenge on Loot and her soldiers, because his civility has become an obsolete concept. By his society’s measures he is a coward and finally becomes a victim and dies. When he gets back to the castle, he is captured and tied to the muzzle of a cannon kept in the courtyard. In the last scene of the book Abel awaits the morning when the cannon will be shot and he will be blown into pieces. Alan MacGillivray comments on the final impression of Banks’s writing: There is “a pervading sense of pessimism in the face of human cruelty and injustice […] there are extended statements of despair and nihilism as Banks’ characters look into the heart of darkness” (1996, n.p.). This comment is more than true about A Song of Stone. Humanity and civility is cowardly and crime prospers. It breeds more crime and nothing but another crime can defeat it.

Iain Banks’s four novels, The Crow Road, Complicity, Canal Dreams and A Song of Stone, form the core of his mainstream fiction dedicated to the portrayal of crime. In these novels Banks incorporates various features of the crime novel, which allows him to create socially committed fiction and also a thorough study of the nature of crime. In Banks’s literary world crime is always free to proliferate so that it finally encompasses all structures. Crime is easy to come into existence as it may start as an emotional moment. However, from this point on, there is no way of eliminating it. Using an overstatement, it may be said that once it is born, it is immortal in its capacity to get reincarnated and in its extensive ability of multiplication and regeneration. The ideal breeding ground for crime is the human desire for power. Banks portrays the world as a victim to the proliferating crime as it spreads from an interpersonal level to national, international and finally global. There is no way to fight it and thus no way to reestablish previous order. Giving crime different names may mask it but it will not change its nature or wipe it out of existence. One heroic stand against the giant of international crime is vain. Fighting crime actively by punishing it may get out of hand as the judge may become the executioner and thus a criminal. Passively watching the proliferation of crime makes one its accomplice and keeping one’s humanity and morals will only result in becoming a victim of crime. Banks’s final view of the world in which there are no truly effective measures against crime and thus without any recourse to order is that of chaos. By the analysis of the four novels by Iain Banks I have reached a rather disconcerting conclusion. Banks’s fiction indeed presents widespread criticism of crime, of society run by crime and of the subsequent irreversible disintegration of social structures, nevertheless, it seems to remain only on the level of critique. There is no explicit proposal for a change or a way out of the vicious circle of crime begetting more crime without any recourse to justice or order. Iain Banks seems to articulate in his novels a sense of nihilism and utter distrust in the human nature. The only possible way to fight crime may be found in the author himself embodying the role of an engaged writer, as Braidwood claims. Exposing crime whenever one encounters it, making it a publicly discussed issue and being personally involved is the only way which may be successful and which also Banks chose for himself.

Works Cited

Baker, Timothy C. 2014. Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Banks, Iain. 1990. Canal Dreams. London: Abacus.

———. 1993. Complicity. London: Abacus.

———. 1994. The Crow Road. London: Abacus.

———. 1998. A Song of Stone. London: Abacus.

Braidwood, Alistair. 2011. “Iain Banks, James Kelman and the Art of Engagement: An Application of Jean Paul Sartre’s Theories of Literature and Existentialism to Two Modern Scottish Novelists.” PhD diss., University of Glasgow.

Charles, John, Cadence Clark, Joanne Hamilton-Selway, and Joanna Morrison. 2012. The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Mystery. Chicago: American Library Association.

Craig, Amanda. 1997. “Armagedon Very Tired of it All.” Review of A Song of Stone, by Iain Banks. New Statesman, August 22.

Duggan, Robert. 2007. “Iain M. Banks, Postmodernism and the Gulf War.” Extrapolation 48 (3): 558–77.

Leishman, David. 2009. “Coalescence and the Fiction of Iain Banks.” Études Écossaises 12: 215–30. Accessed April 19, 2014. http://etudesecossaises.revues.org/208.

MacDonald, Kirsty A. 2012. “‘This Desolate and Appalling Landscape’: The Journey North in Contemporary Scottish Gothic.” Gothic Studies 13 (2): 37–48.

MacGillivray, Alan. 1996. “The Worlds of Iain Banks.” Laverock 2. Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Accessed April 19, 2014. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/Laverock-Iain_Banks.html.

Morton, Brian. 1992. “Speak for Scotland.” Review of The Crow Road, by Iain Banks. New Statesman & Society, April 24.

Page, Ra. 1997. “The Poor Man in his Castle.” Review of A Song of Stone, by Iain Banks. Spectator, August 9.

Pérez, Sergio. 2001. “Major Offenders, Minor Offenders.” In Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by María Pía Lara, 189–97. Berkley: University of California Press.

Pisarska, Katarzyna. 2008. “Search of a Formula: Iain Banks’s Complicity as a Modern Noir Thriller.” In Margins and Centres Reconsidered: Multiple Perspectives on English Language Literatures, edited by Barbara Klonowska and Zofia Kolbuszewska, 149–58. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Naukowego KUL.

Review of A Song of Stone, by Iain Banks. 1998. Publishers Weekly, August 3.

Riach, Alan. 2005. Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Ruggiero, Vincenzo. 2006. Understanding Political Violence: A Criminological Approach. Berkshire: McGraw–Hill.

Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge.

Schoene-Harwood, Berthold. 1999. “Dams Burst: Devolving Gender in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory.” ARIEL 30 (1): 131–48.

Williams, John. 1993. “Fire and Ice.” Review of Complicity, by Iain Banks, White Butterfly, by Walter Mosley, Miss Smila’s Feeling for Snow, by Peter Heeg. New Statesman & Society, September 3.

DETECTION IN THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CAMPUS NOVEL: A. S. BYATT’S POSSESSION AND MICHAEL DORRIS AND LOUISE ERDRICH’S THE CROWN OF COLUMBUS

PETR ANTÉNE

Literary critics make natural detectives. You know the theory

that the classic detective story arose with the classic adultery

novel—everyone wanted to know who was the father, what

was the origin, what is the secret?

A. S. Byatt, Possession

I had read enough mystery novels, seen enough whodunits

on television, that I was a sucker for the drama: yellow

parchment, unfinished sentences, portended treasure.

Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus

The Anglo-American campus novel, sometimes also called academic novel (Showalter 2005, 1–2) emerged after WWII simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States, as higher education and careers in academia were becoming available to a wider range of people from various social backgrounds. The very first British campus novel, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), was a literary sensation that managed to attract wide readership. David J. Taylor aptly notes “Lucky Jim manages what might once have seemed an impossible feat: to make a university don, even an uninspired and soon-to-be ex-don, into a post-war Everyman” (quoted in Robbins 2006, 251), suggesting that many readers might have found themselves unable to fit into their environment similarly to the protagonist, an insecure temporary lecturer at the history department of an unnamed provincial university. While Lucky Jim outlined the genre’s emphasis on the protagonists’ anxiety about getting tenure as well as other topics, such as power and prestige within academia, later campus novels often aimed at increasingly limited audience. Whereas the comic or satirical mode (Robbins 2006, 249), as the novels expose various follies and vices of the professoriate, arguably renders them rather accessible, because of the detailed portrayal of teaching, research and academic conferences, the genre has sometimes been characterized as fiction about academics written and read mostly by academics (Moseley 2007, 5).

Along with the mainstream campus novel, there has also been the subgenre of the campus murder mystery which was foreshadowed even before WWII by Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), a text representative of the Golden Age of British detective fiction. Unlike the campus novel proper, the campus murder mystery may easily reach a wider audience; as J. A. Cuddon notes, “the commission and detection of crime, with the motives, actions, arraignment, judgement and punishment of a criminal, is one of the great paradigms of narrative” (1999, 192). However, in spite of its wide appeal, the campus murder mystery has not received much critical attention or recognition; one of the major authors of campus murder mysteries, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, even published her fiction, from In the Last Analysis (1964) to The Edge of Doom (2002), under the pen name of Amanda Cross, as she felt the need to protect her academic career at Columbia University. The two modes of writing finally crossed in two major campus novels of the early 1990s, A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) and Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus (1991). Both texts were written by already established writers whose previous works, nevertheless, had little in common with academic fiction. Perhaps this was one of the reasons that they enriched the mainstream campus novel with the elements of detective fiction. However, rather than focusing on the theme of murder and its investigation, both Byatt and Dorris with Erdrich chose to portray as detection the methods and discoveries of academic research itself.

Besides using the elements of detective fiction, both texts also to a large extent draw on historical events, whether fictional or supported by evidence. Thus, in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Preface to The House of the Seven Gables” which Byatt uses as an epigraph to Possession, the novel “attempt[s] to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us” (Byatt 1991, ii). In particular, Possession juxtaposes the romantic relationships between fictional Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and two late-1980s scholars, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, researching their lives and work. Similarly, Dorris and Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus, written on the occasion of the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, focuses on a Native American anthropologist’s interpretation of Columbus’s identity, and the results of this discovery for the indigenous peoples. The anthropologist, Vivian Twostar, is in a relationship with Roger Williams, a WASP poet and professor of English, who is interested in Columbus as well, albeit from a completely different perspective, as a mythical heroic figure.

Doryjane Birrer has characterized Possession as “a postmodern anti-postmodern Victorian historiographic metafiction Bildungsroman gothic detective story literary thriller romance” (2007, 50). However, as the elements of metafiction and romance as well as a critique of postmodern philosophy have been present in campus novels at least since David Lodge’s Small World (1984), I argue that it is the features of detective fiction that enriched the genre in the last decade of the twentieth century. Also, while many campus murder mysteries, such as Amanda Cross’s Death in A Tenured Position (1981) that deals with the suicide of an ill-respected female English professor at Harvard, only highlight the problems within academia, the blending of detective fiction and campus novel in Possession and The Crown of Columbus allows for a portrayal of university life as a rewarding and meaningful existence, as academic research is depicted as the disclosure of hidden truths, typical of detective fiction.

Both novels thus portray academia as being far from an isolated ivory tower. Rather than a solitary activity separated from the outside world, academic research is viewed as an activity with larger social consequences. In Possession, Roland and Maud correct the literary and social history of Britain by revealing that a respected married poet was in a secret relationship with another writer, inevitably inviting comparisons with the perception of gender roles in late twentieth-century academia and larger society. Similarly, The Crown of Columbus provides a significant reinterpretation of the explorer’s legacy with far-reaching results for previously colonized nations all over the world. Importantly, in both novels, unethical behaviour poses obstacles to the research carried out by the protagonists. Thus, the perpetrators of this behaviour provide the archetype of the villain necessary to the genre of detective fiction.

In the case of Possession, the strategy of combining academic and detective fiction proved unexpectedly successful, as the novel was not only awarded the 1990 Booker Prize, but also became a bestseller in both the UK and the USA, challenging the traditional claims about campus novels being read by a rather limited audience (Moseley 1991, 6). Twelve years after its publication, the novel was even adapted into a film, albeit one that does not strictly follow the original storyline. Ironically, Sarah Phillips Casteel mentions that The Crown of Columbus was shortly after its publication criticized for its “vivid action sequences appearing to court a Hollywood adaptation” (2012, 79), which, however, was never put into practice. Overall, as Susan Farrell sums up, the novel was seen as “too commercial, too contemporary, and too entertaining to be taken seriously” (1999, 121). It is only recently that The Crown of Columbus has been, in my opinion deservedly, re-evaluated. In this paper, I argue that just like Possession, it successfully combines the elements of campus novel and detective fiction, besides enriching the academic novel with a Native American perspective.

As already mentioned, one of the characteristic features of the campus novel is a satirical tone. As I will show, Possession and The Crown of Columbus satirize both the traditional and the more recent aspects of academia. The only substantial difference in the two novels with respect to their use of satire is closely tied to their narrative techniques. Thus, the omniscient narrator in Possession invites the reader to identify with the two protagonists, Roland and Maud, and reserves most of the explicit satire for the minor characters. The Crown of Columbus, on the contrary, features the two protagonists, Vivian and Roger, as alternating narrators, providing the reader with an access to their thoughts, whether these be worthy of admiration or criticism. Thus, while the protagonists are mostly treated sympathetically, occasionally, the reader recognizes both Vivian and Roger as victims of their authors’ implicit satire.

In spite of the differences, in both novels, the detective plot begins with an academic’s  finding of a manuscript which becomes influential for the discoverer’s future career. In Possession, the academic scholarship that is portrayed as detection focuses on the finding of two intimate letters written by the supposedly major fictional poet Randolph Henry Ash to an unknown female addressee. The letters are accidentally discovered at the London Library in September 1986 by the twenty-nine year old Roland Mitchell, an insecure part-time research assistant to Professor James Blackadder, the editor of Ash’s Complete Works. As a dedicated scholar, on finding the letters, Roland is both “profoundly shocked,” as the married middle-aged writer urgently begs the unnamed lady to see him again, and “thrilled” (Byatt 1991, 9), for he has just discovered a heretofore unknown fact about the subject of his scholarship. As in all of Ash’s biographies, there is no mention of Ash having any love interest other than his wife, Ellen, Roland is determined to examine all available resources in order to identify the addressee. In the diary of Ash’s friend, Crabb Robinson, Roland reads about a breakfast party where both Ash and a Miss LaMotte were present. Finally, Roland identifies the lady as Christabel LaMotte, an author of religious poems and children’s stories. Unlike Ash who has supposedly been recognized as a major Victorian poet, LaMotte is a rather marginalized poet that has been only recently rediscovered by feminist literary critics. In fact, Elaine Showalter views Ash as “a cross between Tennyson and Browning” and LaMotte as “half Christina Rossetti, half Emily Dickinson” (2005, 112).

While Roland makes a discovery in his field of expertise, the anthropologist Vivian Twostar of The Crown of Columbus is not interested in Christopher Columbus at the beginning of the novel. In her tenure year at Dartmouth College, the assistant professor finds herself worried about her academic future, as her curriculum vitae is “top heavy with teaching experience at four different schools but light on scholarly productivity” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 13). To improve her standing as a scholar, Vivian reluctantly agrees to write an article on Christopher Columbus on the occasion of the quincentenary for the 1991 graduation issue of the alumni magazine, having unsuccessfully tried to explain to the associate editor of the magazine that 1492 is “a year of mourning for American Indian peoples” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 13). In addition, Vivian does not feel like writing about the same topic as her boyfriend Roger, who has been working on “an unrhymed monologue about Columbus—a reconstructed voice as in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 16). Thus, Vivian’s motivation to write about Columbus stems only from the need to improve her scholarly reputation.

However, this fact does not prevent her from making a ground-breaking discovery. At the Dartmouth library, Vivian discovers the college’s correspondence with the Cobbs, a family of famous Dartmouth graduates. On examining the correspondence, which has been going for more than a century, Vivian finds out that just like his numerous ancestors, the latest descendant of the family, Henry Cobb, has been asking the college to return “all materials pertinent to Christopher Columbus” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 127), without providing a more specific description. All that Vivian can observe are some recurring words: “‘Columbus,’ of course, but also ‘Eleuthera’ and ‘corona.’ The farther back from the twentieth century I delved, the more elusive references became, with ‘diario’ dangled more and more frequently” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 133, italics in original). While Henry Cobb’s last letter is as recent as 1989, the correspondence remains strikingly vague with respect to the nature of the materials the family has been asking for. Thus, the novel introduces a mystery that is to be gradually unveiled by the protagonist’s research.

Curious, Vivian writes Henry Cobb a deliberately ambiguous letter, stating that she would like to learn more about his theories. Cobb promptly responds with an invitation to Eleuthera, Bahama Islands, all expenses included, and Vivian gladly accepts. As Vivian further inspects the correspondence, she comes across a letter written by a Samuel Martin Cobb to the Reverend of the College, obliquely asking him to determine the authenticity of two pages of a book and a pile of oyster shells, decorated on their smooth undersides with odd raised markings, in an unidentified language. Vivian understands that the sender meant to ask the Reverend whether the two attached pages coming from a diary his ancestors had bought from a Spanish slave owner were really written by Christopher Columbus. As the writing appears to match Columbus’s signature in other manuscripts, Vivian believes she has found two pages from Columbus’s diary and hopes that if she brings the pages and the shells with her to Eleuthera, she will be able to fill in the gaps.

As the two preceding paragraphs suggest, The Crown of Columbus portrays Vivian’s academic research as including all the stages typical of any scholarship in the humanities—looking through archived materials, the examination of found texts, possibly in several languages, determining whether a text may be useful or not for the focus of one’s research, the analysis and interpretation of selected materials, even personal communication or correspondence with other people. Thus, Merritt Moseley’s observation about Possession that “the novel is about scholarship—the discovery of documents, the forming of judgements, the revision of critical understanding” (2007, 6) applies equally well to The Crown of Columbus.

Also, in both novels, the protagonists carry out their research at and outside of the university, in their home country and abroad, finding both allies and adversaries in the process. In The Crown of Columbus, Vivian does not find much support in academia, as she largely sees herself as the college’s “painless affirmative action” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 124). Her relationship with Roger is a source of additional tension. Even though Roger agrees to accompany her to Eleuthera, he is not particularly supportive of her research. Because of his own work on Columbus, Roger aspires to become one of the most recognized authors of fictional biographies in world literature: “Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln. Virgil’s Aeneas. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Christopher Columbus, currently on loan to Samuel Eliot Morison, was still up for grabs, and he would be mine” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 52–3). Thus, in spite of Rogers’s honest interest in Columbus, the chapters written from his point of view reveal a degree of self-importance as well as a lack of respect for his partner’s scholarly abilities. Consequently, Vivian gets more support from her friend Hilda Seelbinder, a professor of geography, and Hilda’s husband Racine, a medievalist, than from her partner.

Similarly, in Possession, Roland has to look for allies among academics whose critical opinions differ from his own. As a scholar in Victorian poetry focusing on a canonical male author, Roland has not been able to find a full-time job in academia, as his field of expertise has been somewhat marginalized after literary theory and feminism became central to the discipline of English literature in the 1980s. Nevertheless, in his search for knowledge, Roland decides to consult Dr. Maud Bailey from Lincoln University, the foremost British expert on LaMotte who happens to be a distant relative of the poet. A feminist critic, Maud is initially not very supportive of Roland’s claim that the freethinking LaMotte corresponded with a traditionalist like Ash and appreciated his poetry, but once they overcome the initial differences in their opinions, Roland and Maud decide to cooperate. Thus, the novel criticizes various philosophical divisions within academia and argues that in order to produce well-founded research, scholars need to be open-minded enough to be willing to go beyond their usual viewpoints. In result, the novel prefers neither the traditional nor the modern approaches to academic research, but rather a synthesis of both.

The research Roland and Maud carry out together soon takes them outside academia. For instance, when visiting LaMotte’s grave near Lincoln, they accidentally meet Joan and George Bailey, other descendants of LaMotte who invite them for tea to their nearby house, Seal Court, and let them see the objects that supposedly belonged to the poet. Inspired by LaMotte’s poem about a doll starting with the line “Dolly keeps a secret” (Byatt 1991, 92), Maud inspects the poet’s doll houses and finds the complete love correspondence between Ash and LaMotte. In this scene, Maud really acts as a detective, being a careful observer and making the most of the knowledge available to her. Also, from now on, the correspondence becomes the two scholars’ shared project; while Roland originated the research, Maud contributed to it in a substantial way. Thus, the novel rejects what Dinah Birch has called the “stereotypes of brilliant detective and dependable but dull-witted associate, initiated by Poe and carried on by Doyle, […] Agatha Christie and […] Colin Dexter” (2009, 289) for a more balanced portrayal of its two protagonists.

In The Crown of Columbus, Vivian also comes to champion an open-minded attitude to scholarly research. Rather than appropriating Columbus like Roger, Vivian becomes sincerely interested in discovering the explorer’s true identity. When evaluating the biographies of Columbus available to her, the assistant professor finds them lacking in providing an objective picture: “Though collected and presented with such care, [the biographies] seemed arranged more to carry out the private agendas of Columbus’s biographers than to prove objectively one theory or another” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 99). As the biographers appear to perpetuate their own theories rather than determine what is correct, numerous speculations about Christopher Columbus prevail, some of them more probable than others. For instance, Roger himself argues that Columbus was Jewish, as he left Spain the same year when Queen Isabella expelled unconverted Jews. As Farrell notes, “in true poststructuralist fashion, Columbus becomes a text, open to nearly endless interpretation as various readers fill in the historical absences surrounding him” (1999, 124).

While the poststructuralist approach to research may complicate the search for truth that links it to the detective plot, it is Columbus’s multiplicity that attracts Vivian towards the explorer. Gradually, she even comes to identify with him: “I could relate to Columbus, stranger to stranger” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 124). Just like Vivian herself is of mixed heritage, “Irish and Coeur d’Alene and Spanish and Navaho and God knows what else” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 123), Columbus was, in her view, a foreigner everywhere he went. In addition, Vivian studies the explorer as she believes that “every word Columbus wrote, every thought he recorded, had enduring importance to Indians—either as a record of our world as it had existed before contact, or as evidence we could use to seek overdue justice” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 149). Thus, because of his heroic poem, she blames Roger for making a career out of “poeticizing history” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 125) and views his scepticism towards the authenticity of her discovery as reluctance to revision the past. Consequently, Vivian and Roger do not manage to tolerate each other’s views.

Similarly, although Possession portrays Roland and Maud as able to overcome the expectations stemming from their different viewpoints, the novel reveals academia as a whole as rather divided, the more so as the text is peopled by the representatives of both British and American scholars in English literature. For instance, the institution devoted to the study of Randolph Henry Ash that Roland and James Blackadder work at is “funded by a small grant from London University and a much larger one from the Newsome Foundation in Albuquerque” (Byatt 1991, 13). The trustee of the charitable trust in New Mexico is Mortimer Cropper, a major American scholar working on the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. However, rather than cooperating, Blackadder and Cropper tend to distrust each other. Rather than his American colleague’s expertise, it is Cropper’s acquisitive tendencies and unlimited financial resources that Blackadder is worried about, as Cropper may be able to relocate all of the Ash manuscripts from the British Library to New Mexico. Thus, the novel satirizes acquisitiveness within academia which has marginalized the scholars’ personal involvement in their research. Also, like the Columbus’s biographers Vivian studies in The Crown of Columbus, Cropper bends the subject of his research to his liking; reading Cropper’s scholarship, Maud suddenly “found it hard to like Randolph Henry Ash, in Cropper’s version” (Byatt 1991, 268). Thus, unlike Roland and Maud, Cropper makes little effort to produce objective research on his subject.

While all the minor academic characters in Possession, whether British or American, also occasionally became the targets of satire for their various characteristic traits, they gradually improve their image. For instance, Blackadder is introduced as a traditionalist in his mid-fifties, who studied under F. R. Leavis and spread his mentor’s conception of literature. Thus, like Roger Williams of The Crown of Columbus, Blackadder views literature as high art, something to be worshipped. However, Blackadder’s belief in the greatness of English literature and personal dedication to his scholarship make him not dissimilar to the two protagonists of the novel.

Beatrice Nest, the other representative of the older generation of British professoriate and the editor of Ellen Ash’s journal, serves primarily as Byatt’s tool to criticize the sexism in academia in the decades after WWII than as a satirical target. When Maud visits Beatrice to examine the journal for any mention of LaMotte, Beatrice admits to her younger colleague that she opted for editorship rather than literary scholarship primarily because it was considered appropriate to her sex. Ironically, when the conditions for women within academia improve, Beatrice’s work on Ellen Ash is not appreciated for being too tame for the feminists. As Blackadder explains to Roland, “poor old Beatrice began by wanting to show how self-denying and supportive Ellen Ash was and she messed around looking up every recipe for gooseberry jam and every jaunt to Broadstairs for twenty-five years, can you believe it, and woke up to find that no one wanted self-denial and dedication any more” (Byatt 1991, 36, italics in original). While not paying much attention to the ideological shifts within academia, Beatrice is a dedicated scholar, careful about not doing harm to the object of her research.

Rather than by Maud, a more radical feminist is represented by the American Leonora Stern. Leonora is of Creole and Native American ancestry; she comes from Baton Rouge and currently works at the university in Tallahassee. Stern is the surname of her former husband Nathaniel, an assistant professor at Princeton. Since her divorce, Leonora has had several lesbian relationships, but she says she now prefers to be independent, as she is “paranoid about home-making” (Byatt 1991, 338). However, while Showalter characterizes Leonora as a “parodic character” (2005, 115), her portrayal considerably improves as the narrative progresses. Most importantly, Leonora is not acquisitive like Cropper, as she only wants to have access to Ash’s and LaMotte’s correspondence. Also, while her scholarship largely assumed that the addressee of LaMotte’s love poems was a female painter named Blanche Glover, once Leonora learns of LaMotte’s relationship with Ash, rather than ignore this discovery, she wants to incorporate it into her future research to provide a complete picture of the author’s work.

Finally, Possession extends its portrayal of Anglo-American academia by featuring the minor character of Ariane Le Minier, a French student of women’s writings who corresponds with Maud. Thanks to Ariane, Maud learns that LaMotte, who was half-Breton, visited her distant French cousin and would-be writer Sabine de Kercoz in Fouesnant in 1859. This fact seems of interest to Roland and Maud, as there is no record of where both of the poets were for about a year between the summers of 1859 and 1860. While Vivian and Roger are accompanied to Eleuthera by Hilda and Racine, Roland and Maud’s research trip is again secret. As Maud admits, “all scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. This one’s got a bit out of hand” (Byatt 1991, 360). The trip proves even more successful than expected, as Ariane gives them a photocopy of Sabine de Kercoz’s journal that covers almost all LaMotte’s visit. The journal closes with a rather unexpected piece of information—Christabel escaped to Brittany from the prudish Victorian society after she got pregnant with Ash out of wedlock. However, all that the journal mentions about the child is that it was born in France. Thus, from now on, the focus of Roland’s and Maud’s research shifts to finding out what became of the child. As Irina Ana Drobot has observed, the history Roland and Maud discover “reminds of the secrets discovered in [Victorian] sensation novels, including love outside the marriage, seduction, and breaking social conventions” (2014, 67). Thus, Possession can be seen as a recent addition to a popular tradition of British crime fiction.

On the contrary, the most shocking discovery Vivian and Roger make once they arrive in Eleuthera concerns the character of their alleged fellow researcher. Once Vivian meets Henry Cobb, he assures her that the crown (corona) mentioned in Columbus’s diary equals “the most valuable single thing in fifteenth-century Europe” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 195, italics in original) and is hidden somewhere on the island. More importantly, Cobb makes clear that it is the supposedly precious crown rather than any historical research that he is interested in. In addition, rather than keeping the treasure in a public space, Cobb has different plans with it: “[The crown] is worth ten resorts. I’m not liquidating an inch of this estate until it’s located, insured, and on the block at Sotheby’s” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 195). Finally, once he has the crown, Cobb intends to dispose of the diary, planning to put the manuscript “on the block as well, page by page, perhaps word by word if there are enough wealthy private collectors” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 206). Vivian’s pleading that even if her two pages contained what he is looking for, they belong to the college or to the country, has no effect. Thus, besides his schemes and manipulations, it is Cobb’s materialism and refusal to share historical records with the public that makes him the villain of the novel.

While Vivian hopes that Cobb will not manage to sell the crown and the diary, she is interested in finding out more about the precious object, which she sees as Columbus’s “gift of ambassadorial goodwill” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 214) to the native populations. Thus, for the time being, she only gives Cobb one of the two pages and asks him to see the rest of the diary. As she studies the diary, Vivian concludes that the text, along with the letter and the shells, is “a puzzle composed of three pieces” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 213–214). Once she is done with her research, she hopes to escape without giving Cobb the second page. While Vivian skilfully negotiates with Cobb, Roger does not hesitate to express his open distrust of not only the man, but also his theories. Unlike Vivian, who does not question Cobb’s claims about the crown, taking it for an expression of respect Columbus showed to the indigenous populations, Roger sees the existence of the crown as a precious object as rather implausible: “To throw in a treasure! It’s really too much of a cliché” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 219). Whereas Vivian’s work could really be characterized as detection, Roger ridicules it by accusing her of “playing detective with that scurrilous Cobb” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 233). Thus, Roger assumes that research carried out by distinguished academics like him is superior to that done outside the university.

It is this open antagonism between Vivian and Roger that Cobb manages to use against them. When Cobb arranges to meet with each of them individually on his yacht, without the other’s knowledge, to discuss the details of what they know about Columbus, they both readily agree. Vivian is rather glad that Roger will not be present to interfere with his sceptical commentaries. Similarly, Roger realizes that it is rather Vivian’s non-heroic interpretation of Columbus than the possibility of the diary’s authenticity by itself that upsets his established image of the explorer. Unfortunately, Vivian and Roger are not aware that Cobb has successfully separated them in order to get the missing page from Vivian, no matter what.

To achieve his goal, Cobb does not hesitate to use the most violent means. First, he pulls the yacht away from Roger, leaving the poet to make his way back to shore through the shark infested sea without a paddle. Then, after Vivian refuses to give Cobb the missing page, he ties her to a bucket of sand, with the intention of throwing her out of the boat and drowning her. She, rather unlikely, manages to free herself by using, in Farrell’s words, “a farcical blend of the various cultural tools available to her” (1999, 128). Thus, Farrell emphasizes that Vivian swings the rope with its bucket of sand at Cobb and kicks him over the side of the boat by a combination of the American hula hoop and the Japanese karate. As Farrell sums up, “although plurality and blending of cultures are celebrated in the novel, they are often presented in such broad strokes and so ludicrously that they seem to be mocked or ironized at the same time” (1999, 128). Thus, no character is completely free of the authors’ satire.

Just like Vivian is slightly derided for her eclecticism and multiculturalism, Roger is, once again, satirized for his pomposity and self-importance. After the sea washes Roger up shore, into a cave made of bat dung, he recites his epic poem “Diary of a Lost Man” from memory, hoping to provoke a reaction from the outside. When he finishes his recitation of the poem, which takes up some fifteen pages of the novel, and no rescuer arrives, Roger passes time in the cave by recapitulating his life, reaching the conclusion that “in the greater scheme of things I had not done so badly. Not like some who for all their brashness were still struggling for a promotion, someone like Vivian, willing to go to any length to discover new and improbable facts about a well-established historical figure. Someone with—God, it was true—the courage to take a chance, even if it meant ridicule, failure” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 347). Suddenly, Roger sees Vivian’s research on Columbus in a new light, as something ground-breaking and respectable. Thus, Roger too comes to value openness to new discoveries and viewpoints.

It is after this realization that Vivian, to Roger’s surprise, appears in the cave. She has had the shells translated by Racine from the Hebrew and found out that they provide the clues to the crown, which happens to be hidden under the bat dung in the same cave as Roger. Thus, immediately after Vivian finds Roger in the cave, they start to examine what is concealed under the layer of guano and eventually they discover an unopened square glass box. As Vivian chops the box, rather than a golden crown, she finds in it the Crown of Thorns that Christ wore during the Crucifixion.

While Racine provides the history of the Crown, as it was kept in Jerusalem, brought to Byzantium, and then its individual thorns travelled across Europe, Vivian is concerned with the perception of the Crown from the Native American point of view: “Maybe [the Indians] thought the Crown was dangerous and so they never opened the box and buried the whole business where no one would mess with it. Maybe they put it in a safe place until someone came along who could explain how to use it. Maybe they just pure and simple didn’t want the thing and didn’t know how to give it back” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 371). Thus, the Crown foregrounds the complex issues of cultural interchange. In addition, as Laura L. Stookey notes, “Columbus’s gift to the New World thus serves as an emblem of the suffering of Native American peoples after contact with the Christians of Europe” (1999, 5). Thus, in a way, Roger has been right all along that there is no golden treasure on Eleuthera, the real treasure being Columbus’s complete diary with its record of the past. At the same time, the search for the crown leads Roger to an increased awareness of both the complexity of the past and cultural differences that continue into the present.

While excluding the threat of death, Possession also climaxes with open conflicts and closes with a major discovery. Once Cropper learns about the existence of the letters exchanged between Ash and LaMotte, he immediately tries to purchase them for his collection. Furthermore, once he has read a small part of the letters, Cropper gives a public lecture in the City, announcing in advance that “a major discovery was to be unveiled” (Byatt 1991, 416). Thus, while Roland and Maud, the true discoverers of the correspondence, are reading Sabine de Kercoz’s diary in France to fill up on the rest of Ash’s and LaMotte’s love story, Blackadder appropriates their discovery, pompously presenting it to the public. At the same time, as Cropper intends to purchase the letters for Robert Dale Owen University, the lecture unites Roland and Maud with Leonora and Blackadder in their effort to keep the correspondence in England.

Importantly, Cropper’s effort to acquire Ash’s correspondence does not stop with hoping to purchase the letters from the Baileys, as he also intends to have those that had been described in Ellen Ash’s journal as “too dear to burn” (Byatt 1991, 482) and were buried with the poet. Fortunately, Beatrice happens to overhear Cropper’s conversation with the poet’s descendant, Hildebrand Ash, and informs Maud that the two men mean to dig up the Ash’s grave in Hodershall. Beatrice even reports the villainous Cropper as saying: “Why not behave like the thieves who took Impression at Sunrise, why not take it and think of a plausible way to account for whatever we find later?” (Byatt 1991, 476). Thus, unlike The Crown of Columbus, Possession locates the villain in academia. Hildebrand Ash, then, is Cropper’s rather unhelpful sidekick whose assistance the academic needs only so as not to appear an absolute thief, as Hildebrand is the future inheritor of all that belongs to Lord Ash, the oldest of the poet’s descendants. Unlike Hildebrand, Lord Ash would not be willing to negotiate with Cropper, since he is a nationalist who had deposited the Ash manuscripts in the British library.

In their effort to prevent Cropper from putting his plan into practice, the other academics get legal support from the lawyer Euan. When all of the characters meet to discuss how to proceed, it is Euan who suggests they follow Cropper around and catch him in flagrante delicto, commenting that “this feels like the unmasking at the end of a detective story. I’ve always wanted to be Albert Campion, myself. We still haven’t tackled our villain” (Byatt 1991, 524). Thus, while Byatt’s academic characters provide references to literary theory and the canon of English literature, a non-academic character links Possession to Margery Allingham’s writing and the Golden Age of popular British detective fiction. As Leonora contributes a story that Cropper reportedly has already stolen one a letter of Margaret Fuller’s, Cropper is envisioned, in Blackadder’s words, as an obsessed collector: “So we are to assume a private, inaccessible cabinet of curios that he turns over, and breathes in at the dead of night, things no one ever sees” (Byatt 1991, 525).

In the final scenes of the novel, the protagonists and their allies confront Cropper and Hildebrand Ash who have dug up a box from Randolph Ash’s grave. Inspecting the content of the box, Roland and Maud find a letter written by LaMotte to Ash that says: “You have a daughter, who is well, and married, and the mother of a beautiful boy” (Byatt 1991, 542), explaining that their child had been born in Brittany and carried to England. By this twist, Maud turns out to be a descendant of both of the poets who has been, unaware, exploring her own origin. Also, Euan informs Maud that because according to LaMotte’s will, all her books and papers go to her sister, all the poet’s letters are Maud’s property. With the correspondence project finally completed, Roland starts thinking about his future, as his diligent work had finally paid off and he had recently received three job offers. Thus, the novel ends on an affirmative note reminiscent of the work of Agatha Christie and other authors associated with the Golden age of British detective fiction; as Jack Miles observes, “in the classic British detective story, order is restored after disruption” (2001, 25). Besides Roland being finally recognized for his academic research, the text closes with a promise of a romantic relationship between him and Maud.

While its elements of violence may link The Crown of Columbus to the American “hard boiled” writing of Dashiel Hammett and other authors (Cuddon 1999, 194), its closure also echoes the restorative tradition of British detective fiction, as Cobb is sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment after Vivian’s televised testimony against him. Like in Possession, the protagonists’ positions within academia level off once Vivian sets out to edit Columbus’s diary. Roger reports that while working on an unexpurgated, annotated version of the diary, Vivian found in the text “material for a plethora of legal approaches under international law, issues of aboriginal claim and sovereignty, of premeditated fraud. The prospects for victories —here, in Brazil, in New Zealand, in Mexico—appear better than anyone would have expected” (Dorris and Erdrich 1992, 375). Thus, while Roland and Maud protect their country’s literary heritage, Vivian’s and Roger’s discovery may have long lasting consequences even for places outside of their native country. Similarly, while Roland and Maud struggle to complete and revise their country’s literary history, Vivian uses Columbus’s diary as a source in her fight for future justice.

In conclusion, as both Possession and The Crown of Columbus skilfully combine the elements of detective fiction and the campus novel, the texts may appeal to readers both inside and outside academia. The detective plots in both texts focus on a couple of university professors and their discovery of manuscripts which disclose heretofore unknown facts, resulting in a reinterpretation of literary or socio-political history. In Possession, the discovery of an intimate relationship between two diverse fictional poets changes the body of scholarship dealing with their work. In The Crown of Columbus, the discovery of the explorer’s diary brings a redefinition of Columbus’s perception of the native populations and the right to their land. Thus, the ground-breaking discoveries bring in the portrayal of academic research as a meaningful occupation and the portrayal of personal relationships accentuates the academia as a place where people find collegial support and emotional nourishment. As the detective plots necessitate villains that pose obstacles to the protagonists, these are also the primary satirical targets for their acquisitiveness and materialism. However, the satire also concerns the division in academia into the conservative traditionalists and the supporters of postmodern philosophical theories, calling for a meaningful synthesis of both approaches as a prerequisite for well-founded research. In spite of their postmodern elements and concerns, the texts tend toward a restorative ending, reminiscent of the Golden Age of British detective fiction.

Works Cited

Birch, Dinah. 2009. “Detective Fiction.” In The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch, 289–90. New York: Oxford University Press.

Birrer, Doryjane. 2007. “From Campus Fiction to Metacritical Fiction: A. S. Byatt’s Academic Novels.” In Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre, edited by Mark Bosco and Kimberly Rae Connor, 50–71. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.

Byatt, A. S. 1991. Possession: A Romance. New York: Vintage.

Casteel, Sarah Phillips. 2012. “Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary.” MELUS 37 (2): 59–81.

Cuddon, J. A. 1999. “Crime Fiction.” In The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, edited by C. E. Preston, 192–95. London: Penguin.

Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. 1992. The Crown of Columbus. London: Harper Collins Publishers.

Drobot, Irina Ana. 2014. “Literature as Part of an Academic’s Life in the Campus Novels Ever After by Graham Swift and Possession by A. S. Byatt.” Scientific Journal of Humanistic Studies 6 (10): 66–68.

Farrell, Susan. 1999. “Colonizing Columbus: Dorris and Erdrich’s Postmodern Novel.” Critique 40 (2): 121–35.

Miles, Jack. 2001. “Happily Ever After.” Review of Thinks…, by David Lodge. Commonweal, August 17.

Moseley, Merritt. 2007. “Introductory: Definitions and Justifications.” In The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays, edited by Moseley, 3–19. Chester: Chester Academic Press.

Robbins, Bruce. 2006. “What the Porter Saw: On the Academic Novel.” In A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, edited by James F. English, 248–66. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Showalter, Elaine. 2005. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SHADOWS OF THE FANTASTIC OVER BAKER STREET: COUNTERFICTIONALITY IN RECENT REWRITINGS OF THE SHERLOCK HOLMES SAGA

SÁNDOR KLAPCSIK

Sherlock Holmes and the Fantastic

According to Thomas M. Leitch, “Sherlock Holmes is not the fictional character who has been played by the largest numbers of performers in film adaptations. That honor goes to Count Dracula, played to date by 121 actors, followed by Tarzan at 108, and Frankenstein’s monster at 102” (2007, 207). Nevertheless, the overarching presence of the fictional franchise of Sherlock Holmes has become so extensive and influential that Holmesian phrases (“Elementary!”), objects (his pipe and deerstalking hat) and places (221b Baker Street) have become hyperreal, obliterating “the line between representation and simulacrum” (Polasek 2012, 192).

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most often adapted literary characters. He is present in full length feature films, his own televised series (in 1954 by the American producer Sheldon Reynolds, in 1984 by the British company Granada, from 2010 by BBC and from 2012 by CBS), special episodes of other television series (for example, widely influential productions like the CSI or Star Trek franchise), Japanese amines, and children cartoons (Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes; 2010). His figure has had a huge impact on detective fiction and also inspired canonized literature, for example the main character William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980).

It is important to note that many of these works are influenced by not only the strict scientific rationalism of detective fiction or, as Michael Saler says, “the use of reason to re-enchant the world” (2003, 609) but also the fantastic, especially if the story is marketed as a publication in comic books, fantasy, horror fiction, science fiction (SF), or steampunk genres.

The combination of Sherlock Holmes with fantastic themes is implicit in Conan Doyle’s oeuvre. As David Stuart Davies argues, “it is not too giant a step to take Holmes and Watson into the twilight world of the supernatural” (2008, 4). First, Holmes investigates seemingly supernatural events which eventually gain a rational explanation in, for example, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” (1910) and “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1924). Second, Doyle (who believed in spiritualism and the existence of fairies) also wrote horror, fantasy and SF stories, amongst which his Professor Challenger series gained the highest recognition. Third, it may provide a special similarity between Holmes and immortal vampires or other fantastic monsters that Holmes almost “literally died and was reborn” (Leitch 2007, 216).

Pastiches, parodies and adaptations almost immediately turned this implicit connection into explicit. August Derleth’s Solar Pons series, for example, brought together the detective with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos as early as 1945 (Fowler 2015, 16). Many recent works inspired by the Holmes saga openly play with their source texts by mixing the “rationalistic” tradition of detective fiction with the fantastic. Enough to mention here Alan Moore’s comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–), and various short story anthologies and collections: Michael Reaves and John Pelan’s Shadows Over Baker Street (2003), J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec’s Gaslight Grimoire (2008), certain texts in John Joseph Adams’s The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2009), and the Diogenes Club series (2006–) by the British horror author Kim Newman.

One of the most common fantastic characters that appear in such stories is Count Dracula: Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) as well as Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992–) series feature Sherlockian characters in the company of Bram Stoker’s monster. Analogously, in Bob Madison’s short story “Red Sunset” (2008), Holmes and a hardboiled detective—whose narrating style parodistically evokes Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow series—form a temporary league to defeat Dracula’s vampires. The bizarre connection between Holmes and Dracula has been observed and analyzed by critics as well (Cottom 2012, 546–55; Leitch 2007, 217).

The similarity between Doyle’s two famous heroes, Holmes and Professor Challenger, has also been recognized and utilized by several writers (see, for example, Powel 2008 or Green 2009). Manly and Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds (1975) is a sequel to the Holmes and Challenger stories, a science fiction novel in which the two protagonists have to fight against H. G. Wells’s Martians.

Although a number of critics have written about Sherlock Holmes adaptations, a detailed survey about the fantastic adaptations and rewritings of Sherlock still waits to be conducted. This essay aims to take the first steps in this direction. Firstly, I describe a common practice of contemporary popular culture in order to outline the basic characteristics of Sherlockian adaptations, deploying Matt Hills’s notions of “counterfictionality” (2003, 440–42) and “intertextual cultural capital” (2005, 173–75). Secondly, I analyze Neil Gaiman’s short story “A Study in Emerald” (2003) as a case study in order to demonstrate that contemporary rereadings and rewritings of the Sherlock Holmes saga simultaneously satisfy the expectations of those interested in popular culture and high culture. Thus, these works appeal to readers and critics of fan culture and mainstream literature alike (see Klapcsik 2012, 61–65).

Counterfictionality

Matt Hills’s term “counterfictionality” describes a fictional world that “is intertextually constructed in relation to an already existent fiction” (2003, 436). In other words, these texts do not belong to SF because they evoke “the real world” from which they extrapolate a fantastic or science fictional world. Instead, they critically adapt, rework, combine and subvert other well-known fictional worlds: such a writer “deliberately sets out to re-construct, modify, and merge prior, existent fictional worlds” (Hills 2003, 440).[27]

These are “alternate story stories,” since an extensive knowledge of several previous fictional worlds is needed for the reader to fully comprehend the text (Hills 2003, 441). Of course, popular cultural texts have always contained many allusions and quotations. In these works, however, as Di Liddo observes in connection with Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982–1989), “the amount [of intertextuality] is overwhelming, and their nature is re-elaborated and reshuffled to such an extent that an estranging, almost whirling effect of polysemy is guaranteed” (2009, 41). The alienating effect is even intensified when in some cases, as in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the setting becomes “a place where every character who’s named (and a fair few that aren’t) come from fiction” (Parkin 2009, 85). The audience needs to recognize and keep in mind hidden references to narrative worlds in the forms of fictional characters, places, objects, events and—especially in comic books—visual images (see Di Liddo 2009, 39–40).

To make the reader’s task easier, the writer often selects to allude to elements and heroes of well-known and often adapted literary works. If, for example, the setting is the late 19th century, usually such iconic figures as Count Dracula, Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll, H. G. Wells’s Martians, and Holmesian characters such as Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, Lestrade, Professor Moriarty, and Dr. Watson appear in the texts.[28] Another help may be when fans and critics create webpages, often soon after the text has been published, to list the intertextual references (Di Liddo 2009, 43). Authorial notes may also explain the origins of the writer’s inspirations: Moore, Newman and Gaiman often comment on their own works accordingly.

Hills emphasizes that counterfictional works frequently have a critical stance—they do not only borrow but also subvert previous narrative worlds and worldviews. Following Linda Hutcheon’s description of postmodern parody, such texts do not just quote but also modify their source texts: “This ironic playing with multiple conventions, this extended repetition with critical difference, is what I mean by modern parody” (Hutcheon 1985, 7; emphasis added). The function of critical commentary frequently becomes tangible: counterfictional works may imply, and be influenced by, recent philosophy, feminism, post-colonialism, queer studies, or cultural criticism. Many contemporary writers try to lay emphasis on the perspective (voice and focalization) of female characters, homosexuals, minority groups, non-western characters, and so on. Thus they evoke Gérard Genette’s metafictionality, which “unites a given text to another, of which it speaks without necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact sometimes even without naming it [… in a] critical relationship par excellence” (1997, 4; emphasis in original). For example, Newman’s “The Gypsies in the Wood,” a story in his The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (2007), overtly criticizes Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) on the grounds that the story served as an excuse for the well-off to ignore beggars and those living in poverty, as Doyle’s text indicates that a professional beggar can earn more than a journalist, elevate himself to the status of a country gentleman, and start a respectable family.[29]

Nevertheless, in spite of their high number of literary allusions, the fully fictional or intertextual nature of these texts is questionable. First, some of these fictional characters and worlds are already considered “real”: Holmes, soon after Doyle’s publications, appeared in advertisements, pastiches, newspaper articles, and so on. As Thomas Leitch observes, even though readers know that he is a fictional character based on Dr. Joseph Bell, Doyle’s teacher at the University of Edinburgh, many of them pretend to believe in the existence of Holmes (2007, 211). What is more, “the cult of Holmes focuses not just on a singular character, but on his entire world: fans of the ‘canon’ obsess about every detail of the fictional universe of Doyle,” as well as every other character of the saga (Saler 2003, 602; see also Leitch 2007, 210). In short, fandom made Holmes real almost immediately after the first successful stories, and a large number of serious and satirical rewritings and adaptations have maintained the Sherlockian world’s pseudo- or hyperreal position (Polasek 2012, 191–95). On the other hand, the life of Conan Doyle has become to a certain extent fictional and interwoven with Holmesian cases: readers often wrote to the author to ask for advice in criminal investigations, while modern writers place Doyle into the storyline of their pastiches, as it happens in Bradley H. Sinor’s “The Adventure of the Other Detective.”

Second, although previous fictional worlds dominate the textual world in these works, it needs to be emphasized that historical reality always remains intact in traces. Certain historical elements need to lurk in the background, no matter how counterfictional a book or film is, probably because it would hardly be plausible and entertaining to omit any reference to historical facts, objects, or persons. For example, Lavie Tidhar’s steampunk novel The Bookman (2011) includes characters drawn from the Holmes saga and the Cthulhu myth, in addition to historical characters such as Karl Marx, Jules Verne, Charles Babbage, and the Byron family. H. G. Wells appears as a principal character in Stephen Baxter’s “The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor,” while Geoffrey A. Landis’s “The Singular Habits of Wasps,” a story revolving around the SF cliché of alien imposters that intend to invade the Earth, features Wells, Thomas Huxley, and Jack the Ripper.

Analogously, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992) is saturated not only with various fictional characters of the 19th century, including those of the Sherlock Homes saga such as Lestrade, Mycroft Holmes, Moriarty, and Moran, but also several historical figures like Florence Balcombe, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Beatrice Webb, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Jack the Ripper, and so on. It is highly indicative that besides the fictional Prime Minister Lord Ruthven (a character taken from John William Polidori’s 1819 short story “The Vampyre”) the actual historical figure of the Conservative British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is also mentioned, and Queen Victoria plays a crucial role in Newman’s novel. Furthermore, Moore not only authored counterfictional texts but also historical ones, such as From Hell (1988–1996), which gives an overview of the late Victorian Period and the mysteries surrounding the murders of Jack the Ripper.

Intertextual Cultural Capital

Another notion that has to be discussed here is what Matt Hills calls “intertextual cultural capital.” Drawing on the famous French critic Pierre Bourdieu, Hills emphasizes that with intertextual references a writer does not only create a text, but also targets an audience, relying on or creating a niche in the culture industry.

Interestingly enough, counterfictional texts often incorporate both what Matt Hills calls “intertextual cultural capital” and “intertextual subcultural capital” or “popular cultural capital” (2005, 173–75). This means that their allusions are simultaneously tailored to subculture knowledge as well as to the standards of highbrow literature and theory. They intend to oscillate between the institutions, markets and audiences of popular culture and those of high culture. The texts can achieve this, in my view, via two basic ways:

1. A possible way for texts to appeal to both subculture (or popular culture) knowledge and the mainstream (or high) culture knowledge is to focus on a character that occupies a liminal position between the two cultural fields. This is obviously the case if the work features such a character as Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr Jekyll, the Gods of Cthulhu, Sindbad in the Hungarian literature—and, of course, the characters of the Holmes stories.[30] The Holmes stories are, in fact, already canonized to some extent, just as much as certain pastiches with Holmesian topoi, for example, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

2. Many contemporary fantasy or “mashup” authors mingle characters, topoi, style, and other thematic and formal elements both from “mainstream” and “genre” literature.[31] Enough to refer here to the comic book or graphic novel tradition. For example, Neil Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night's Dream (1995) is a rewriting of the original Shakespeare play, placed in the storyline of the Sandman series. Such texts often evoke the contemporary popular subgenre of the “crossover,” in so far as they unify heroes whose adventures can historically overlap and thus mix various genres: detective fiction, horror, SF, spy fiction, fantasy, mainstream literature, and so on. The most prominent example may be Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. These comic books feature a Sherlock Holmes character (James Moriarty), H. G. Wells’s heroes, Count Dracula, and the James Bond saga, while they also refer to Dickensian characters, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Nana Coupeau, Emile Zola’s character from L'Assommoir (1877) and Nana (1880). Kim Newman’s The Hound of the D'Urbervilles (2001) consists of several stories narrated by Sebastian Moran, mingles Holmesian characters with the storyline of H. G. Wells’s “The Crystal Egg” (1897), and also includes references to Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Huxley and Thomas Hardy. Similarly, his Anno Dracula is a rewriting of Bram Stoker’s work but also alludes to several other canonized works and so “locates itself in relation to what are ‘classic’ texts, actively bidding for canonical status,” elevating the genre of the horror novel to a “legitimate” position (Hills 2003, 452).

Counterfictionality in Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”

“A Study in Emerald” is a widely marketed, award-wining and extremely popular short story.  It was first published in Michael Reaves and John Pelan’s Shadows over Baker Street, in which various authors engage with Holmesian and Lovecraftian themes. The story was also published in Gaiman’s short story collection Fragile Things (2006) and later in Adams’s The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, it is one of the few Gaiman stories legally accessible online, available in the form of an illustrated edition with the artwork of Jouni Koponen.

The story is a prime example of Hills’s counterfictionality, since it uses complex intertextual, hypertextual and metatextual references. This becomes extremely conspicuous when each section of the short story is introduced by a motto in which historical and literary figures advertise their “services”: they are infamous human monsters of the late Victorian era, for example, Jack the Ripper, Count Dracula, Henry Jekyll, who have become shady entrepreneur physicians in Gaiman’s mash-up universe. With this the story—especially the illustrated online version—follows the comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which also includes extensive extra material, including a paint by number toolkit designed by Basil Howard, the painter in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The story’s most significant source text, however, is the Sherlock Holmes saga, more precisely, Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). Gaiman deploys Genettian intertextuality when the text incorporates several direct quotations from Doyle’s novel. For example, a literal quotation from the novel is the word “Rache,” a message written with blood on the wall of the crime scene.[32] The title of the short story is another intertextual reference, as it draws on Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. In Doyle’s novel, the title is a pun, both referring to the room where the body and a large amount of blood is found, and figuratively, to the case as a preliminary artistic outline, a composition for the practice of a point of technique.

[The adventure becomes] a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon? There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. (Doyle 1996, 26).

Gaiman closely follows Doyle’s novel, as the short story also deploys the various meanings of the word “study,” although slightly alters the context, and the colour, of course:

The body, what was left of it, was still there, on the floor […] It had soaked into the threadbare carpet and spattered the wallpaper. I imagined it for one moment the work of some hellish artist, who had decided to create a study in emerald (Gaiman 2007, 34–35).

Another—slightly more covert—direct quotation is the fictitious name “Sigerson.” In Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1894), Sigerson is the Norwegian pseudonym that Sherlock Holmes uses while he is exiled from London and hides from his enemies, the accomplices of James Moriarty. In Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” Sigerson is the perpetrator’s Icelandic pseudonym. Besides the altered nationality, it further complicates the allusion that Gaiman’s characters form an inverse relationship with those of Doyle. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson turn into the perpetrators, described as “the Tall Man” and “the Limping Doctor” (Gaiman 2007, 48). Thus, the detective must be James Moriarty, while his sidekick-narrator is most probably Sebastian Moran, the sharpshooter and culprit in Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House.” Although both the detective and the first person narrator remain unnamed throughout Gaiman’s story, the text is eventually signed with the initials “S_ M_” (2007, 56), which most probably stands for Sebastian Moran. It may also be telling that The Hound of the D'Urbervilles—written by Kim Newman, whose Anno Dracula series admittedly influenced Gaiman’s story—uses Sebastian Moran as the narrator of the short stories, as well.

Gaiman’s story indicates the substitutable nature of conflicting sides and characters in detective fiction, in a way similar to Sinor’s “The Adventure of the Other Detective,” in which Dr Watson finds an alternate reality where Moriarty is the famous detective and Holmes is the criminal mastermind. These stories resemble Viktor Shklovsky’s hypothetical detective story, a rewriting in which “the state detective […] would be victorious […] while the private detective would no doubt be floundering in vain. In such a hypothetical story Sherlock Holmes would no doubt be working for the state while Lestrade would be engaged in private practice, but the structure of the story (the issue at hand) would not change” (1998, 110). Something similar happens in Gaiman’s and Sinor’s stories: although Sherlock Holmes becomes the culprit and the traditional perpetrator Moriarty turns into the ingenious detective, the structure of the story, the pattern of detective fiction is neatly maintained.[33]

“A Study in Emerald” also utilizes and demonstrates Genette’s hypertextuality, when the text transforms the Holmesian elements—characters (Lestrade, private detective, sidekick), settings, and so on—into a fantastic story; the fabula of a detective story is placed into a fantastic narrative. The story can also be interpreted as a transformation of Lovecraftian fantasy-horror, as it transfers Lovecraft’s supernatural characters—the Great Old Ones— from rural New England to the Victorian London of a detective story.

Finally, in a way similar to contemporary Holmesian counterfictions, “A Study in Emerald” deploys Genette’s metatextuality, since it provides a critical commentary upon Doyle’s works. The story outlines an alternate history, a Victorian society ruled by Lovecraft’s monsters, a mixture of Doyle’s and Lovecraft’s universe. At the same time it gives a critical commentary upon the age, since—in a way similar to Anno Dracula—it transforms the actual historical characters and leaders, the representatives of imperial or commercial power, into the monstrous (see Hills 2003, 451). Furthermore, in Gaiman’s universe Moriarty and Sebastian Moran are the new heroes, whose similarity to Holmes and Watson questions the righteousness of Doyle’s characters, who occasionally fight for the interests of the British empire as it happens, for example, in Doyle’s highly patriotic “His Last Bow” (1917). Thus, the story becomes also similar to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where professor Moriarty is employed in the service of the British Intelligence, and where the monstrous and fallible protagonists “have a significant critical function toward Victorian culture and toward the representation of that culture provided by nineteenth-century authors” (Di Liddo 2009, 106).

Conclusions

I have intended to demonstrate in this paper that many fantastic works which draw on the well-known convention of the Sherlock Holmes saga belong to Hills’s “counterfictions.” Therefore, they simultaneously appeal to readers of popular culture and mainstream literature.[34] As they often incorporate a complex intertextual web of allusions and quotes, they heavily rely on explanatory notes and interpretations provided by critics and fans alike. There are special websites created by fans that enlist the references, while critics also include similar explanations in their analysis.

My analysis of Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald” has intended to prove that this story, influenced by Moore and Newman’s works, belongs to the genre of counterfictions. Such works simultaneously give homage to, parody, and criticize numerous source texts, using Genette’s hyper-, inter-, and metatextuality. Accordingly, “A Study in Emerald” refers to multiple sources, reverses Doyle’s traditional character roles, subverts the expected narrative perspective of Dr Watson, and mixes seemingly contradictory textual and genre conventions.

Gaiman’s story—which has been published several times, including an illustrated edition—also exemplifies that the fantastic adaptations of the Sherlock Holes saga often appear in well-marketed popular literature. Their counterfictional nature becomes extremely significant and conspicuous for the reader, as these stories are institutionally supported, licensed, and developed via communities of publishers and fans. Their allusions incorporate both what Matt Hills calls “intertextual cultural capital” and “popular cultural capital.” Thus, it could be argued that the conterfictional nature of “A Study in Emerald” is a result of target-marketing: the story targets a niche of science fiction and fantasy fans as well as detective fiction fans who enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories, since it is economically viable for a publisher to produce intertextually-specific works where the authors engage with themes of Holmesian, fantastic, and high cultural texts.

Works Cited

Adams, John Joseph, ed. 2009. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. San Francisco: Night Shade

Baxter, Stephen. 2009. “The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 196–214. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Burgess, Anthony. 2009. “Murder to Music.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 181–95. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Campbell, J. R. and Charles Prepolec, ed. 2008. Gaslight Grimoire. Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes. Calgary: EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Cottom, Daniel. 2012. “Sherlock Holmes Meets Dracula.” ELH – English Literary History 79 (3): 537–67

Davies, David Stuart. 2008. “Foreword: Ghosts May Apply.” In Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Charles Prepolec and J. R. Campbell, 1–5. Calgary: EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. 1996. A Study in Scarlet. In The Original Illustrated “Strand” Sherlock Holmes. The Complete Facsimile Edition, 11–63. Ware: Wordsworth Edition.

Duncan, Andy. 2003. “Alternate History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 209–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fowler, Christopher. 2015. “The Strange Case of Solar Pons.” The Independent, February 15.

Gaiman, Neil. 1995. “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In The Sandman: Dream Country, 62–86. New York:  DC Comics.

Gaiman, Neil. 2007. “A Study in Emerald.” In Fragile Things. Short Fictions and Wonders, 25–56. London: Headline.

Gaiman, Neil and Jouni Koponen. 2015. “A Study in Emerald.” The Official Website of Neil Gaiman. Accessed April 30, 2015. http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/ shortstories/emerald.pdf

Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Green, Dominic. 2009. “The Adventure of the Lost World.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 302–11. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Hills, Matt. 2003. “Counterfictions in the Work of Kim Newman: Rewriting Gothic SF as ‘Alternate-Story Stories’.” Science Fiction Studies 30 (3): 436–55.

Hills, Matt. 2005.  The Pleasures of Horror. London: Continuum.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen.

Klapcsik, Sandor. 2012. Liminality in Fantastic Fiction. A Poststructuralist Approach. Jefferson: McFarland.

Krúdy, Gyula. 2012. The Adventures of Sindbad. Translated by George Szirtes. New York: New York Review.

Landis, Geoffrey A. 2009. “The Singular Habits of Wasps.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 224–43. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Leitch, Thomas M. 2007. Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Madison, Bob. 2008. “Red Sunset.” In Gaslight Grimoire. Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec, 253–72. Calgary: EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

McIntyre, Vonda N. 2009. “The Adventure of the Field Theorems.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 96–119. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Meyer, Nicholas. 1976. The Seven Per Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. London: Coronet Books.

Moore, Alan. 2009. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions.

Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill. 2000. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Vol. 1, 1898. La Jolla: America’s Best Comics.

Newman, Kim. 2007. “The Gypsies in the Wood.” In The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, 1–80.  Austin: Monkeybrain

Newman, Kim. 2011a. Anno Dracula. London: Titan Books.

Newman, Kim. 2011b. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles. London: Titan Books.

Parkin, Lance. 2009. Pocket Essential Series: Alan Moore. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books.

Pi, Tony. 2009. “Dynamics of a Hanging.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 332–40. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Polasek, Ashley. 2012. “Sherlockian Simulacra: Adaptation and the Postmodern Construction of Reality.” Literature/Film Quarterly 40 (3): 191–97.

Powell, Martin. 2008. “Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World.” In Gaslight Grimoire. Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes, edited by J. R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec, 126–57. Calgary: EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Reaves, Michael and John Pelan. 2003. Shadows over Baker Street. New York: Ballantine Books.

Robinson, Chris. 2009. “Merridew of Abominable Memory.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 341–55. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Saberhagen, Fred. 2010. The Holmes-Dracula File. New York: Tor.

Saler, Michael. 2003. “‘Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity.” The Historical Journal 46 (3): 599–622.

Shklovsky, Viktor. 1998. “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 101–16. Urbana: Dalkey Archive Press.

Sinor, Bradley H. 2009. “The Adventure of the Other Detective.” In The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by John Joseph Adams, 65–83. San Francisco: Night Shade.

Tidhar, Lavie. 2010. The Bookman. Nottingham: Angry Robot Books.

Wellman, Manly Wade and Wade Wellman. 2009. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds. London: Titan Books, 2009.

PART II.

CRIME AND DETECTION

BEYOND LITERATURE

DISPLACED DETECTION: SURVEILLANCE AND ALGORITHMIC LOGIC AS A NEW MODEL OF

THE CRIME CALCULUS

ZOLTÁN DRAGON

When Sherlock Holmes started to work on a crime case, the reader had no clue as to the solution until the mastermind finally revealed what he had been brewing in his unimaginably complex mind. What the reader could follow was one of the many possible paths of logical deduction—usually one that notoriously misled them so that it would be a pleasurable experience, a true catharsis to learn who the culprit had been. Fast forward to the 21st century, and we see a lot of masterminds crowding in an office filled with digital interfaces, looking at screens, throwing in suggestions which are immediately countered by algorithmic logic—a logic that seems to know it all. With the introduction of the famous CSI-shots which fundamentally changed our relation to knowledge in crime detection, we can see exactly what the investigators (experts, no longer detectives) do, and we also know that thinking is but a byproduct of the process of the calculus deployed in solving the crime at hand.

What this change entails is a shift in detection paradigms. In classical detection we encounter the mastermind detective, who is asked to take on a case that seems to be either too simple or too complicated to tackle. The detective starts to produce theories, complex systems of deduction in order to distill the context and define the motive of the culprit. Then he or she starts testing these theories against the evidence pouring in (or the lack of evidence) and modifies the system accordingly to arrive at the only possible logical explanation, thus solving the case. This method, no matter how logical and mathematical it seems, is driven by intuition—the individual characteristics of the specific detective. That is why Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple are so impressive: there is something in their personalities that the reader puts before all the sheer logical processing performed, a trait that hovers over all explanations—that is why we say, it is only him or her who could solve the particular case and no one else. In other words, it is the human element in the crime calculus (precisely the unknown, the incalculable) that is used to formulate the result. Take this element out of the calculation and the case would never be solved.

To a certain degree even hard-boiled detectives can be considered as similar characters here: while they are in certain aspects absolute opposites of the mastermind-type of classical detectives, they too provide that human trait in crime detection that, on the one hand, makes cracking the case one-of-a-kind, on the other hand, makes the detective recognizable. In this case detection is, of course, less of a theoretical structure and its testing, and more of a testing and then concluding, but the human crime calculus at work remains noticeably connected to the character and is not detachable from the protagonist. Many of today’s detectives or investigators, especially in television procedurals, however, get into a new model of detective work which is more and more defined by technology and less and less by what characterized the above two types.

Let me illustrate my points with a couple of examples, the first of which seems to be a non-related one, yet, signifies the shift I described above perfectly. The protagonists of the series, Castle (a detective case in itself as to its metatextual and self-reflexive ontogenesis), are the title character Richard Castle, a mystery writer and detective Kate Beckett of the NYPD. The odd couple meet and enter an—at first—working relationship after a serial killer imitates the plots of Castle’s novels, so he gets permission from the Mayor of New York City to tag along with Beckett’s homicide investigation team for research purposes. When, at the onset of season six, detective Beckett leaves New York, called on duty in Washington D. C., leaving her NYPD job is just one part of the new circumstances: the most interesting turn is in her giving up her method and praxis of detection.

Beckett can be seen at the crossroads of the classical detective and the hard-boiled counterpart as she does a lot of thinking, analyzing the traces and evidence, building theories, leaving or modifying them on the fly, then going out onto the streets and do the heavy lifting as well to finish up the case. However, in Washington, she is part of a high-tech team of investigation that works in a room the walls of which are in fact digital interfaces: detection, the operative part of the investigation happens on these massive virtual walls, while flesh-and-blood detectives are standing by, waiting for the computer to spit out the results so that they could spring to action. This algorithmic calculus taking over the role of human brainwork is a kind of e-detection, a virtualized arena of evidences tracked down, suspects located, alibis checked, theories compared and contrasted by the click of the mouse. In this scenario the true detective is the computer operator—all the official detectives surround him, looking at his screen expectantly, and it is only when he finishes his hacking wizardry that others might get a chance to actually do something useful. But the moment the investigation arrives at a halt, the computer guy is approached again to crack the case—so much so that at the end it is his interaction with the digital interface that solves the case.

What this type of investigation proposes is precisely the prevalence of science over intuition: the power to see implies the power to know, to detect, to comprehend, which gives mandate to act. Knowledge is therefore no longer connected to intuition; it is rather nourished by power:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (Foucault 1995, 27)

This ideological position of a scientific nature gives the pretext for a sort of representable (and thus respected) knowledge: a type of discourse that is not obscure, secretive, but provides hard evidence even when going to sub-visible (i.e. for human capabilities) levels with the help of technology. In the typical CSI detection practice, for instance, it is the medical gaze that forms the basis of interpretation: our genes are no longer responsible only for our character traits or physique; they even make us succeed or fail in crime. With this also comes the subtext that there is no perfect crime: as crime is a fault in the universe (and in a universe that can be kept at bay by algorithmic knowledge), it can be detected (usually, interestingly, precisely as a computer virus: a software algorithm initiates a search that comes up with a result—on a computer screen we see the identification of the virus or Trojan malware, on the interface of the given crime series we see the photo of the culprit, same typography, same way of identification logic), and thus can be eliminated (quarantined, as for the viruses and malware—detention for the criminal).

These instances, i.e. examples of representable knowledge, are marked by technology, which in turn lays bare their constructedness. Hans Belting considers this type of situation the “absence of sight,” as these technological tools used to obtain the images for detection help the characters access visual information about scenes and scenarios otherwise hidden from their sights.

But even here we replace the remote targets of vision (let me call them bodies) with images, which not only use technology but are entirely dependent on it in order to make these worlds present to our sight. Such images are of even greater importance than they would be in an average situation. We often forget that they only simulate the immediacy of a perception, one that seems to be our own but, in fact, is theirs. (Belting 2005, 313)

The role of the human-computer interface in contemporary visions of crime investigation is getting to be similar to the situation well-known in science-fiction universes. In Philip K. Dick’s “brave new world,” Minority Report, one is even caught before he or she thinks about the act: the crime prevention process that starts from the visionary precogs whose dreamlike collage of imagery is edited into a cinematic or CCTV sequence by the person who is supposed to know, Precrime Commissioner John Anderton. In this case, surveillance precedes even the very act to be seen, thus completely subverting the classical detection logic. Yet, Minority Report remains conservative at its core: it is still the human brain that processes the information coming from pre-surveillance, thus detection—while carried out on a digital interface—sticks to the manly domain of inspectors.

In the television series Person of Interest, however, the logic is taken at its most extreme: precognition is done by faceless algorithms, humans are but accessories in crime preventions. While even in the dystopian vision of Minority Report, decisions were made by humans and actions by a human-machinery combo, in Person of Interest the table has ultimately turned: algorithms do the brainwork, while the detective is a mere executor, practically a flesh-and-blood robot, or a human parameter with an .exe file extension. Person of Interest is about a billionaire software-genius, Harold Finch, who creates a Machine for the government that is designed to detect acts of terrorism before they could happen. The Machine monitors every cell phone, email and surveillance camera around the world: it obviously sees more than just acts of terrorism in preparation. Finch is after this extra option, that is the potential to look into private individual lives in order to stop violent crimes before they can happen—something the government is not interested in. He builds a backdoor into the Machine that allows him to retrieve the social security number of the persons of interest, and partners with John Reese, an ex-CIA agent, thought to be dead, to stop violent crimes. When they turn out to be quite successful, suddenly everyone wants to get the Machine—by now even the government is interested in the surveillance potential of the system.

The Machine is like the mathematical calculus equivalent of the precogs in Philip K. Dick’s fantasy: it does not have the built-in minority report function (that is designed to log opposing views on a case) as it does not need it: when it gives a social security number to the small team, the person connected to that number will be involved in a violent crime either as a victim or as a perpetrator. What is intriguing in the surveillance logic introduced in the series is that all the solutions (or possible solutions used as hooks in the stories) are offered by the surveillance system. Solution does not only mean cracking the case: it is also within the realm of the digital system that retaliation, or the restoration of order occurs.

The question is how has our social fantasy incorporated the idea and practice of surveillance systems to this depth and how we, individuals respond to this. Virtually all types of contemporary instances of the surveillance systems stem from the theory according to which the basis of surveillance logic is precisely that there is no need for complete and overall surveillance. It is the belief, even more so, the conviction that one is there to be seen that completes the job of the surveyor. Michel Foucault refers to Jeremy Bentham’s prison architecture as the physical model of a previous social practice that came out of the difference in dealing with the lepers and the great plague. In Discipline and Punish, he talks about how the former were cast outside society so that they could die alone, away from the crowd, while the answer to the plague was complete, obedient discipline. He recounts the way people were confined to their homes so that they could not get into touch with those sick with the plague, which eventually led to the setting up of a complete surveillance mechanism in society.

It is precisely this social practice that served as an example for Bentham when he designed the panopticon, the prison where the mass (a dangerous, uncontrollable force) was broken down to separated individuals that could be tamed in such a way that the control was just partly enforced from the outside: it was introjected by the subjects themselves. Importantly, the psychic mechanism of self-surveillance induced by the architectural design, or the apparatus, of the prison was originally thought of as a kind of “machine”—an algorithmic sequence that would catch up the inmates “in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearer of” (Foucault 1995, 201):

Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. (Foucault 1995, 201)

Foucault’s insight is indicative here of our contemporary social network that is more and more based on the sole interface in front of us that at once renders power present and invalidates its imminent action. It is precisely the work of software algorithms that operate obfuscated by the interface, defining power relations in general today. In this sense, it is a 21st-century replacement or development of the panopticon idea, in which the walls and glass surfaces have become the digital interface that lulls the user into a forced interactivity—according to its own logic enforced on the user.

Without getting into the debate whether the logic of panoptic surveillance is irrelevant or not a completely satisfactory description of how our contemporary, Western model of society works as argued by certain post-panoptical theories,[35] this Foucauldian–Benthamian logic seems to be an adept working mechanism for surveillance systems today (like cameras in the supermarkets, ATMs, airports, etc.). Surveillance is presupposed, and it does not really matter for most whether it operates as a real control, or if it is present only to signal the possibility of inspection—we take it for granted that we are watched. If not watched, then we have the back-up option of carrying mobile devices that are effectively tapping into our private sphere, more than any live feed would do on CCTV.

The logic of the panopticon, of the Foucauldian panopticism, is parallel to the logic of classical detection: Holmes, for instance, does not need to see what had happened and how the crime was committed, he does not have to be there to see. The culprit develops the feeling of being watched when following the logic of detection—Holmes is a genius of exerting the effect of the Gaze on his suspect, who then fails to counter this artificial situation and is forced to surrender. With the development of contemporary surveillance systems, however, the logic and method of crime calculus have completely changed: one does not have to feel being watched—in fact, the task of the surveyor is to remain as invisible as possible, averting inquiring gestures. It is the overall, complete technosphere of surveillance, the impalpability, the omnipresent, yet undetectable presence (i.e. non-presence from the subject’s point of view) of it that makes it work more effectively.

While the epitome of surveillance technology, CCTV systems were once deployed in a typical heterotopic fashion, i.e. they were part of a well-designated logic of a domain within society that sustains its own role and rules as separate from that of society—one might risk to claim that our entire society has become irreversibly a heterotopia itself. The technology that once closed the borders of a heterotopic institution is now the everyday experience of those outside these institutional borders. As if the Freudian concept of the unheimlich gave way to its repressed other within, the heimlich and turned the mechanism inside out, exerting an uninvited subjectivization on individuals of the normative social stratum instead of the previous mechanism of subjecting “abnormality” to surveillance.

In detective fiction or the contemporary CSIs we tend to focus on the technology that helps rounding up the criminals. Technology is seen as a godsent bless on good people, helping us to strengthen the walls of normalcy. What this view suggests, according to John Fiske, is that

Information technology is highly political, but its politics are not directed by its technological features alone. It is, for instance, a technological feature of the surveillance camera that enables it to identify a person’s race more clearly than his or her class or religion, but it is a racist society that transforms that information into knowledge. […] The video camera is efficient in the information-gathering phases of surveillance, but in storage and retrieval the computer is king. (Fiske 2001, 384)

While information technology is heralded as the latest tool for crime detection, the same technology is used to scan us, non-criminals as well: the same way, all the data is available for those in the know to analyze and use it. In a turn not dissimilar to the situation shaping up in Minority Report, we are also surveyed, traced, and tapped even before we think we would spring into action. This brings us to the Deleuzian critique of the Foucauldian panopticism, as “the numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals’ and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks’” (Deleuze 1992, 6). In the society of data—as an updated model of the society of spectacle in some sense—surveillance has turned from spectacle to the discrete units of digital footprints, and should be seen purely on algorithmic turns today: precisely as dataveillance. As Bart Simon argues, “in societies of control the individual is doubled as code, as information, or as simulation such that the reference of the panoptic gaze is no longer the body but its double, and indeed this is no longer a matter of looking but rather one of data analysis” (2005, 15).

One approach to think about this new situation is to see how we are co-present in blunt, physical reality and in the online, virtual arena as well. The new kind of subjectivity drawn here entails an intricate process of tracing one’s avatar: not only the visually composed set of images that we use as identifications of ourselves on social networking sites or personal websites, but also the invisible digital footprints that we inevitably leave behind when browsing the World Wide Web.

This online subjectivity layer is in fact more than what it seems to be at first glance. Users know what sites they have visited, what videos they have just watched on YouTube or whom they have recently befriended on Facebook—but the internet knows a lot more about them. Upon logging in at Amazon.com, for instance, the algorithm behind the site instantly recommends the visitor a wide range of items by analyzing the online route it took to get there and the collected digital footprints one may take afterwards as well. The algorithm knows where the visitor comes from, what he or she does there, and it knows exactly whither they leave. It registers not only clicks on hyperlinks (using them as expressed interests to be analyzed further if the visitor returns next time), but eye movements, mouse tracks, scrolling speed, etc., that is it creates a complex profile based on the visitor’s behavior. In fact, a lot of companies do nothing but trace our footsteps and compile a virtual map of our online travels. The avatar is thus an ever growing dataset composed of our navigation, browsing habits, likes and dislikes, which then “picture us” so that we can be identified when entering a site of commerce—or just being online for various reasons.

To see who follows your invisible digital footprints, one handy tool to refer to is the Lightbeam extension for Mozilla’s Firefox browser: it gives you an interactive infographic representation of those sites that you connect with without actually clicking on their hyperlinks by accident or on purpose. What it shows the user is the way the conscious and intended browsing among sites generates a shady backdrop to the explicit online route: sites one never visited pop up and follow the user’s traces without any approval. When talking about avatars or online representations of subjectivity, this is what should be meant: the intentioned plus the unintentional pieces of navigation that one performs when browsing.

Recently, Beth Coleman investigated how our perception of reality is changing by the minute and how our online persona is getting more and more emphasis in how we see ourselves. In Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, she elucidates the difference between offline and online dimensions that is usually at the core of discussion of contemporary digital identity, and contests the use of such a binary opposition. Instead, she points out how the two have really become one inseparable experience and goes on to offer the term “x-reality” (can be read either as “ex-“ or “cross-reality”) that is the quasi-virtual realm intertwining the two domains of experience (Coleman 2011, 3–4). If we connect the experience of X-reality with the practice of dataveillance it becomes clear how algorithms are able to connect the dots and build up a complex database of avatars that can be deployed in an investigation situation. Surveillance now becomes the technological embodiment of the Lacanian Other, the source of the volatile Gaze that sees all and is nowhere to be found—with a tiny little extension: the logic and comprehension is in the domain of programmable software and database. This is exactly the root of the belief in the Other who is supposed to know: computer calculations are infallible, while human logic is biased—i.e. culturally determined—from the onset.

But how is this digital, dataveillance-inspired Other working in terms of detection? To define the notion of the gaze (as different from the look), Lacan uses Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors. The image is organized in such a way that its spectator misses only one point: the incomprehensible stain down in the middle that does not seem to fit the orderly representation. However, upon leaving the spot designated by the perspectival system of representation and looking back at the image, a perfectly comprehensible image starts to take shape at the cost of losing sight of the larger picture: a skull staring at the spectator (Lacan 1998, 82–90). The anamorphosis taking place in the process introduces a point in the field of vision that overthrows the masterly position of the spectator enforced by the perspective system and delegates it to the impalpable, elusive, or volatile point that seems to have been looking at the spectator even before the spectator could comprehend the visual perception arising in the situation—this is the gaze.

In the classical detective situation we have the detective standing in front of the clue (the image), trying to figure out where the tiny bit of information is hidden that would reveal the trick of the image and thus its logic of representation (whereby the detective realizes the position of the object and becomes a subject in the know, thus solving the case). The typical sentence Kate Beckett says when the investigation seems to halt is “Perhaps we are looking at it in a wrong way”—which is a call for detectives to “look awry” (Slavoj Žižek)—the solution more often than not comes with Detective Ryan rushing into the room saying, “Guess what the tech guys have just found.” The image/clue in the new detective paradigm does not offer the changing of the vantage point for the human—it can only be cracked by algorithmic logic. In other words, there is a non-human element, a raw, cruel logical mechanism that intrudes into the Symbolic and Imaginary unity attained in the Lacanian scenario. It is, thus, only by taking classical detection out of the equation that the case can be solved; and it is done so by activating the surveillance system that can “look” at the data in a different way, resulting in crime dataveillance.

While search parameters, deduction, and many more calculations as performed by the computer are determined and programmed by human beings, many of the artificial intelligence algorithms of contemporary television series (and Hollywood movies) learn from their “mistakes” or inaccuracies and are able to correct their operation or delegate tasks to other algorithms to process even more accurate information. In Minority Report, for instance, when Anderton is convinced that the precognition that foreshadows his crime and thus his fall is false, it is human perception that falters in a domain where it should ultimately excel—interpretation and detection. It is precisely this problem that makes Person of Interest a step forward inasmuch as it eliminates the human element from the equation: the algorithm is far more precise in crime calculus than the deductive or inductive logic as performed by the detective or inspector.

Surveillance used to operate as a sidekick to human logic and detection techniques. Today, surveillance has clearly displaced detection and prevails in the investigative process. This is possible as surveillance has developed into a complex array of digital technologies—an information structure that has learnt how to learn, how to create and propose new angles on old cases. Big data cumulated by street and online surveillance is quickly turned into a real-time facial recognition system that easily spots suspects and connects their position with their cell and GPS data, plus with all the aggregated digital footprints, filtered to suit the needs and focus of the investigation.

Surveillance is now more than just watching: it is about information and knowledge. The two domains used to be separate: one was there to be explored like a map, the other that drew the itinerary for that map. Originally the work of a detective was twofold: collect evidence, and by deducting possible scenarios, catch the culprit. Today, however, the process of detection is not a retroactive investigative gesture: it has become proactively inserted in the mechanism that used to precede any detective work, i.e. surveillance, or dataveillance. By now, surveillance not only collects data, but utilizes it in ways that we used to call detection. The phrase “to detect” has become a command in the code deployed to operate surveillance or dataveillance systems. And who is the detective in the scene? He or she is the one who hits enter.

Works Cited

Belting, Hans. 2005. “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology.” Critical Inquiry 31: 302–19.

Coleman, Beth. 2011. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3–7.

Fiske, John. 2001. “Videotech.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd edition, 383–92. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.

Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. London: Vintage.

Simon, Bart. 2005. “The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 3(1): 1–20.

MEDIATING THE CORPSE: CSI AND THE

AFFECTIVE SCREEN

DÁVID LEVENTE PALATINUS

Among the proliferating figurations of biomedical and medico-legal knowledge about the human body in popular culture, forensic crime fiction plays a curious and emblematic role as a genre and a representational form that poses questions about the bio-social, technical, and philosophical dimensions of the body in medico-legal discourse. This chapter uses CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000-2015) as an example of practice to comment on the affective agency of television, and the role it plays in the mediation of posthuman anxieties about the fragmentation of the human body. It will also consider the ways CSI re-positioned for television the prosthetic character of technology (both off and on the screen) by rendering it a supplement of the human, and by extending notions of visibility and hapticity beyond the boundaries of organic life. To that end, forensic procedures, particularly autopsy and the technics of the corpse will be discussed along the lines of affect and participation.

Forensic crime dramas focus on characters, events, spaces, and, first and foremost, procedures that, before the forensic turn in the 1990s, were relatively underexposed in crime television: the protagonists are scientists rather than hard-boiled cops, and the plot covers forensic (that is, medico-legal) procedures ranging from evidence collection and processing to autopsies, and to the use of CG imaging technologies that are said to have redefined viewers’ expectations about the cinematographic traits of crime television. The most peculiar asset of forensic dramas, however, is their preoccupation with the human body – its complexity as evidence, as a site of signifiers and traces, as an object of scientific scrutiny. Forensic crime dramas anchored the concept of the “body-as-signifier” in a semiotic as well as a phenomenological-psychoanalytical context in a way that was unprecedented(?) in the history of serial programming. And by attempting to reconstitute an illusion of a corporeal presence in response to the experience of the fragmentation of the physical body, forensic crime television managed to find a way to amplify the spectrality of death and decay.

I would argue that crime dramas like the CSI-franchise, Bones (Fox, 2005-2017), Dexter (Showtime, 2006-2013) Crossing Jordan (NBC, 2001-2007) or Body of Proof (ABC, 2011-2013), and some episodes of Whitechapel (ITV, 2009-2013), Ripper Street (BBC One, 2012-2016) and even of Hannibal (NBC, 2013-2015), to mention some more recent examples too, draw on the cultural and ideological complexity of medico-legal procedures, and highlight the fact that modern autopsy has always been regarded as an ambiguous cultural practice that necessarily involves (acts of) transgression. These acts themselves are legitimized as practices designed to counter-act, that is, to contain, objectify, deflect, and finally, reverse, violence. But (the representation of) autopsy is itself predicated on practices that are violent because, as acts of penetration, transgression, exposure, they are subversive and traumatic themselves. As Girard (1979) and Foucault (1977) claim, (visual) representations of violence are co-extensive with the cultural space they derive from. The anatomical theatre was not only seen as the place of death, as a space where the ephemerality of life is underscored by the sight of decaying flesh. Since the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries when public autopsies became more frequent, autopsies have been social events as a form of education as well as entertainment, and capitalized on the prospect of techniques and procedures that promised to make visible the invisible. On the other hand, they were often regarded as penal practice. The Anatomy Act introduced in 1832 in England provides an example of practice; it allowed for the bodies of executed criminals to be handed over to medical institutions for study purposes, thus rendering autopsy an uncanny and much disputed part of the punishment of the said criminals. So, while on the one hand there is an underlying fascination with human anatomy on the part of the uninitiated public, there is also fear and repulsion associated with pathology as bad medicine (which the Gothic literary tradition capitalized on to a great extent), which made responses to the celebrations of scientific grandeur equally paradoxical. Portrayals of autopsy in contemporary popular television are paradigmatic because although the offensiveness of the procedure itself has been relativized as “objective violence”, to borrow Zizek’s terms, (2008, 2), the critical and popular responses to the explicit visuality of these programs remain ambiguous.

Affect and Corporeality

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation debuted on CBS on October 6th, 2000 and ended its 15-year run on September 27th, 2015. The show miraculously turned over the odds multiple times. For instance, it not only survived the departure of actors like Gary Dourdan, William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger and Paul Guilfoyle from its original cast, but it in fact successfully capitalised on the personal changes the creators implemented by bringing on board, among others, Lawrence Fishburne, Ted Danson and Elizabeth Shue. In spite of extensive changes to its ensemble, the popularity of CSI remained solid and relatively unchallenged over its fifteen seasons. Rather than relying on action-packed sequences and extensive shootouts like most traditional cop shows, CSI maintains suspense and achieves its dynamism primarily by appealing to the viewers’ scientific curiosity and their fascination with fictions of visual technologies and of scientific and corporeal knowledge. The graphic portrayal of corpses, injury, mutilation and, finally, autopsy, however, are among the features of forensic crime television that are most susceptible to diverse forms of critical as well as spectatorial response. This affective agency echo what Laura Mulvey identified as practices of voyeurism, the fetishization of bodies as objects of seeing, the phenomenology of the gaze, desire and repression or the psychology of suspense (1975). The subject-matter, as well as the visual style, of forensic crime television has often been described as disturbing, offensive, and pornographic (cf. Weissmann and Boyle 2007, 91-92). The penetrative nature of the camera, the voyeuristic perspective of the flashbacks, or the corpse’s exposure to the medical gaze might substantiate such claims. One example of a cinematographic technique of this sort is the much-discussed CSI-shot, the use of a virtual camera floating into the body through orifices or wounds, in order to reveal internal cavities, organ deformations and tissue damage. As Karen Lury (2007) and Lindsay Steenberg (2013) explain, the CSI-shot is one way in which “violence is substituted for sex in the forensic genre and in which the corpse, filmed using pornographic syntax, is sexualized” (Steenberg, 5). By reaching beyond a simple gesturing at a misinterpreted necrophilia or the fetishization of the body, forensic crime fiction becomes paradigmatic also with respect to the apparent popular fascination with medical and pathological knowledge, the phenomenology of perception, and the aestheticization of violence.

As far as spectatorial response is concerned, there is practically very little difference (if any) between the physiological factors and socio-cultural agencies of fascination and repulsion. Forensic crime fiction and, especially, film, present an example of practice for these “pathological fantasies” in popular culture. Crime fiction embodies the trauma of the real. In forensic crime fiction the idea of the “body-as-signifier” becomes paramount, and is exploited both from a semiotic (the-body-as-text) and a phenomenological-psychoanalytical (the-body-as-image) point of view. What is common in these contexts is that they all attempt to reconstitute a fiction of some kind of corporeal presence in response to the fragmentation of the physical body. The body reveals its own textuality in one way by playing upon the materiality of the written sign manifest in the process of the visual perception (the reading and/or seeing) of the same body. On the other hand, the body is “only” present as an image which, by appealing to a more subtle interpretation, operates as a conceptual frame of reference. As a result, forensic crime film appears to be the epitome of the preoccupation and fascination with which post-modern (urban) culture surrounds the experience of the (dead or fragmented) body. In forensic crime dramas the image of the body emerges as the par excellence manifestation, the “embodiment”, of a lost narrative. At the same time, forensic crime fiction reaches beyond a simple gesturing at a misinterpreted necrophilia or the fetishization of the body. With regard to the relationship between spectatorial response and the power of images Brigitte Peucker observes:

Cognitive and phenomenological approaches to perception alike tell us that spectatorial affect is real even when it is film and not reality that produces it. Thus, the emotional and bodily responses of the spectator can be said to extend textuality into the real world. (Peucker 2007, 1)

David Freedberg’s explication of the body, the image of which is capable of inducing strong cognitive, emotional, and somatic responses in its viewers, underscores a transposition that occurs between the real and its representation, the image of the body and the positing of its “actuality” as a kind of internalized otherness, thus inscribing the psychopathology of the body into the discourse on perception. As Freedberg explains, this transposition unveils an underlying “cognitive relation between looking and enlivening” (Freedberg 1989, 325). It is not difficult to trace the introjection of the corporeality-paradigm in Freedberg’s logic; in the act of looking the “image-ness” of the image is temporarily suspended.

Once we perceive the body as real and living (or once we wish to perceive [the body] as real and living, or to reconstitute forms with some such result), we invest it with life and respond to it accordingly. […] The issue is not one of context, since to claim this much is not to attempt to achieve terms of definition for what is or is not seen to be lifelike, [or real, or living] in particular cultures or contexts. It is rather to suggest that there is a cognitive relation between looking and enlivening. (325)

I therefore consider forensic crime fiction as paradigmatic with respect to our post-modern fascination with neurobiological and pathological knowledge, phenomenology of perception, and the aestheticization of violence. Forensic crime fiction is paradigmatic for the constitution and dissemination of meaning – at all levels of the organism, be it bio-physiological and cognitive or socio-cultural and retroactive. In the following I will lay special emphasis on the ways one of the most emblematic televisual examples of forensic crime fiction, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, exploits the various forms of visualization by overwriting traditional patterns of visual narrative, camera work and mise-en-scène. By merging the technologies of medical imaging with the technics of the TV screen, CSI introduced a visual rhetoric that repositioned the conceptions of seeing, and challenged the boundaries of scientific discourse. This visual aesthetics entails a kind of “realism” that emerges as “hyperrealism” in the sense that, in turning death into a spectacle, it finds a way to visually amplify the social anxieties surrounding autopsy, and whatever the corpse might stand for.

Technics, Visuals and Pathological Knowledge

The technological imperative that underlies the production and dissemination of meaning in forensic science is also constitutive of the conceptual framework of forensic crime fiction as well as the techno-aesthetics of the TV-screen. Bernard Stiegler uses the term technics to describe this imperative (1998, 82-134). The term is meant to bridge the gap that results from the rigid separation of tekhne and episteme. Technics, for Stiegler, denotes the prosthetic supplementation of the human, a horizon of human existence where forms of knowledge depend on the “hard technologies” through which they are produced and disseminated. Stiegler’s ideas are based on the understanding that culture and learning, strategies and practices of knowledge are defined by the technical developments of a given age, and that bodies are lived, experienced and performed by way of the implementation of technological apparatuses. Applying the formula to CSI, we can say that the underlying episteme operative in the representation of forensic science is defined by the hard technologies of the cultural and temporal context. In other words, new hard technologies generate new episteme. Hence what I call the forensic paradigm: the new, democratized forms of visualization result in new, democratized forms of knowledge about the body. And hence the difference between techniques (implying strategies and epistemological structures), hard technologies and technics (the technological embodiments of epistemology).

Therefore, rather than relying on action-packed sequences and extensive shootouts like most traditional cop shows, CSI achieves its dynamism primarily by appealing to the viewers’ scientific curiosity and their fascination with fictions of visual technologies and of pathological knowledge. In the focus of the show are characters, events, spaces, and, first and foremost, practices that, until this point, have been relatively underexposed in the crime genre: medical examiners, forensic scientists, and procedures ranging from autopsies, DNA analysis, blood spatter analysis, evidence collection and processing to the use of state-of-the-art CG imaging technologies in the reconstruction of crimes. The most important feature, however, is the preoccupation with the human body – its complexity as evidence, as a site of signifiers and traces, as the object of scientific scrutiny, as a piece of art in its own right, and, finally, as the subject of extensive technologization.

What gives its specificity to the world of CSI is a form of predominantly visual scrutiny that literally penetrates the surface of the body. By exposing the audience to the visual experience of viscera, CSI re-contextualizes the very concept of the body and anchoring the idea of the corpse-as-signifier. As every type of detective fiction, CSI, too, dramatizes structures and paradigms of semiosis. The forensic scientist pushes their way through the plethora of signs and traces, his or her primary concern being to (re-)construct meaning – by piecing together the fragments of a lost narrative. However, the emphasis on the pathologization of both the victim’s and the observer’s body situates semiotics not only in a socio-cultural but also in a biosocial context. Barbara Stafford’s claim that the mind is “a phenomenologically distributed system that learns multiple ways of inhabiting the world in relation to our bodies, other people, diverse organisms, and the ecology” (2008, 33) is really a reverberation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, suggesting that the conceptualization of language is interlocked with bodily drives, with the conceptualization of the (living) body (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1964, 12-43).

As Sue Tait remarks, “what distinguishes CSI from other crime dramas is the focus on scientific procedures” (2006, 48). By dramatizing the practices of evidence / data collection and processing, “CSI constitutes a performance of […] fictioned science” (49). Even though it draws on real-life crime cases and forensic procedures, the show admittedly retains the distance between fiction and reality in so far as it does not aspire to documentary status. Martha Gever explains that

One of CSI’s most curious features is its ambivalent appeal to realism. The series’ episodes are narrative dramas with characters who resemble, and are sometimes modeled on, actual forensic scientists; they are also fictions with plots sometimes borrowed from actual cases. But the aesthetic style of the program never tries to mimic documentary realism. (2005, 458.)

The depiction of procedures and the mise-en-scéne of the techniques and technicalities that surround them highlight a different kind of interest, namely, that science is staged as being aesthetic, often overlaid with “a pedagogic tone, rendering viewers as initiates to the discourses of forensic science” (Tait 2006, 49). Martha Gever describes this aesthetics from a cultural-historical perspective. She argues that the series goes beyond the kind of simplification and popularization of methods and technologies used in science that characterize most science-movies, including science-fiction:

CSI has accomplished a rare feat for commercial television: bridging the divide between modern science (not science fiction) and entertainment. Although this may seem an odd coupling, the two cultural fields share one important attribute: both concentrate upon the production of new kinds of knowledge using new kinds of scientific apparatuses and the inscriptions these produce. (2005, 450)

The apparent aesthetic lure of CSI, that of its looks in particular, underscores the intelligibility of science as that which also bears, or, at a minimum, aspires to an aesthetic appeal, especially as regards the growing tendencies to visualize and visually disseminate pathological knowledge. These tendencies seem to work towards the reconfiguration of the self-defining strategies of science “from within”, in an auto-poetic manner. In other words, the aesthetic plays an important role in the understanding of the concept of science. In CSI science works towards the visualization of the physical trauma inflicted on the human body. It is through the contribution of science that the body transforms from fragmented and chaotic flesh into a meaningful discourse on the one hand, and an aestheticized object of entertainment and scrutiny on the other hand.

As a result, forensic pathology assumes also a spectacular appeal due to the heavily stylized context that frames it. The city of Las Vegas, with its neon splendor, hotels, casinos, and a variety of residents, guests, tourists, opportunists, gamblers, tycoons, hotel and casino-owners, or, for that matter, freeloaders and runaways, provides a perfect location for virtually any kind of crime to take place, and a constantly challenging environment for the investigators to pursue their profession. The setting allows for a range of different types of crimes normally associated with different groups of society to be pictured, and enables the show to give insight into several forms of socially deviant or extravagant behavior. The Las Vegas Strip, consequently, is pictured as a hyper-intensive, surrealistic world where nothing is out of context, and is also a rather uncanny space with the many architectural doubles (replicas) that it offers. The city as signifying space becomes the quintessential construct of what Guy Debord calls the “society of spectacle”, where social relations and cultural practices are predominantly set within a milieu determined by the presence of overwhelming spectacularity, within a space that constantly challenges the concept of the real. The spectacular appeal of the cityscape is most plausibly exemplified by the functionality of building-replicas such as the Eiffel-Tower or the Grand Canale of Venice in the visual and architectural design of the city. Other locations like hotel- and casino interiors, night clubs, or more intimate spheres such as the insides of houses expand the image of the Las Vegas Strip into a panoptic overview of a society built on spectacle.

The city is presented as a spectacle, but this spectacle eventually constitutes the compositional focus of the mise-en-scène of violent crimes. Otherwise stated, the spectacular quality of the city enhances the spectacular quality of bodies. The glowing lights of the Strip are echoed and balanced out by the dim blue sterility of the autopsy rooms, where the body is exposed to sight. The logic of composition serves a meta-discursive and meta-pictorial purpose as well. The mise-en-scène of crime deconstructs the cityscape as a mere image that pleases the eye, and discloses the visual plasticity of violence. This, however, may also suggest a retroactive re-aestheticization of violence and crime. To better understand this mutually retroactive conditioning of violence and spectacle, we must take a closer look at the visual style of CSI.

(De)Constructing Pathology on the TV- Screen?

The psychological and emotional impacts of images is particularly stigmatized in the case of the motion picture, which is by nature understood as “a technique of the imaginary” (cf. Metz, 1990, 3) and as the “first ever medium to fulfill the longstanding aspiration to show moving images of the real world” (Mulvey 2006, 33). The question of the real, more specifically, the question of the representation of the real has always been coupled with the close scrutiny of the intricacies that perpetuate concerns with perception, sensation and cognition. The same question inadvertently results in problematizing response with respect to the visual techniques of creating suspense. However, the psychologization of crime receives little emphasis in CSI. Crime is never presented “from within”, from a subjective point of view.  Instead, CSI shows crime as an “inside of an outside” – it pathologizes crime and presents it from the perspective of the corpse, rather than of the cop or the villain. As a consequence, the only real protagonist of CSI is the body, the corpse that, through the application of the technological and scientific apparatuses that surround it, becomes the materialization of crime. And inversely, the corpse can be read as the mark, the trace crime leaves behind, as the inscription of crime into the body of society. Rather than using action-packed sequences, the show achieves its dynamism primarily through maintaining the viewer’s suspense – by appealing to their scientific curiosity and fascination with the body. To that end, plotlines incorporate relatively long lab scenes introducing the infallible technological gear with the help of which the body is processed and, eventually, established as a repository of signs.

Technology, body and lab practice alike are depicted in great detail and in a visually appealing fashion. Death and the body do achieve a unique, marked, even stigmatized status though.  The primary focus of the narrative is to shift the audience’s attention from the crudity of effect, which would be the purpose of the horror film, to the “physiology of the crime”, to the physiological impact crime has on the body: in other words, to the minute details of the corporeality of crime. As a result, forensic crime TV primarily represents a mode of expression that adopts a unique visual style, an emphatic dark tone in its choice and elaboration of characters and themes. CSI uses very thoroughly composed and nicely shot images where the choice of color and the mise-en-scène aim at a rigorous aestheticism of the picture. The aesthetic of CSI’s visual style finds a way to construct and mediate, that is, to visually amplify, distort and reassert the anxieties of society. Accordingly, this realism does not have to do with the “real,” it does not have to do with the real city, or with actual places within a city. It has to do with the look of the real, with what the audience recognizes and appropriates as “real”. Therefore, the hyperrealism of forensic crime fiction (and TV) does not signify a return to an extreme or naturalistic “representationalism”; forensic crime fiction does not re-present in the classical sense of the word; it dramatizes reality in such a way that the real is exposed to and, subsequently, informed by the viewers’ superimposed experience of the real.

Like many other films, CSI is not meant to literally reproduce reality, but rather to question realities, and confront us with the novel and the unknown. Wolfgang Iser comments on the reproduction of reality and the effect of films and writes the following:

[t]he fact that certain films gain effect by an intentional reproduction of everyday reality in order to render such an obsessive repetition unbearable shows that the reality itself is not the reason for the presentation. (1993, 181.)

The visual look of CSI is constructed by the transparent (and over-rhetoricized) technologization of the image, which works towards the continuous maintenance of the viewer’s suspense. Camera position, low key lighting, imbalanced lighting, deep focus, dissymmetrical mise-en-scène, and extreme low and high angles are all manifestations of technics constituting meaning (cf. Place and Lowel Peterson 2005, 66). In the program, the technologization of the image amounts to an excessive dependence on the technical and material factors that determine the logic of composition in order to visually signify something that cannot be told verbally. The visual appeal of images presenting brightly lit spaces like clubs, cafeterias or casinos, or dimly lit lab interiors and interview rooms, is primarily the result of a consciously and purposefully manipulated interplay between light and shadow, background and foreground, deep and shallow focus, and is designed to signify, frame and accentuate the moods, dialogues or actions of characters appearing in those spaces. These elements also create a marked illusion of spatial distance between the bodies of the characters and those of the viewers, locating the viewers’ gaze in an outside, but still within the cinematic apparatus.

Yet, it is not only the technics of the cinematic image that qualifies for our attention. The visualization of science and crime also greatly relies on the implementation of often yet-to-be invented, fictional technologies at the disposal of the scientists. Visualization, consequently, can be taken into account in two ways. First, as the presentation of lab procedures which, as I have already stated, take up a great deal of actual screen time: typical sequences show CSIs working in the lab analyzing specimens, pulling DNA from hair samples, experimenting with tools that might have been used as murder weapons, or searching databases of fingerprints, number plates, shoe prints. Such sequences often involve a filming technique where the image displays multiple focal points, with screens showing in close-up what is happening under the microscope or on the autopsy table, with an additional beam of light directed at the actual procedure. Secondly, visualization also comprises sequences using technologies of vision that aid the human eye (that of the CSIs and of the viewer) to see things otherwise inaccessible. The viewer is bombarded with such images as microscopic trace evidence seen through computer screens, CG reconstructions of crime scenes and bullet trajectories, or the inside of wounds, body cavities and images of healthy as well as damaged tissues and organs. As regards the heavy use of technological devices that envelop and manipulate vision, CSI features significant auto-poetic tendencies. Gever notes that

[i]ndeed, CSI goes to great lengths to reveal the means of production and a curious kind of self-referentiality is built into the series. The discovery of truth – what really happened – in any CSI episode requires the careful reading of inscriptions, both by the fictional investigators and the audience. The program’s televisual style inscribes a particular way of seeing. (459)

In other words, CSI, in an auto-poetic move, thematizes and elevates on a metadiscursive level forms of spectatorship and the techniques of image-making. Crime story can be considered as the par excellence meta-discourse and fictionalization of semiotics – in fact the actualization of what Jonathan Culler calls “the pursuit of signs.” This means that in order for the evidence or the body to become texts that can be read, they first need to be established as a series of signs. Trace evidence and the corpse depend on decipherment; they only become signs or traces for the learned eye. In other words, the semiotics of crime amounts to a language of its own that needs to be learned by the CSIs in order for them to be able to read the body, the crime scene or trace evidence as a text. As a consequence, even though CSI stands before us as a modernist genre-fiction underpinning a modernist (utopian and positivist) epistemology and the idea of objective science, the collapse of narrative referentiality, the decisive role of auto-poetic patterns in the representations of technology and the (re-)creation of narratives, the semiotic bouncing between the linguistic and the pictorial sign and, most importantly, the concept of the fragmented body appear as post-modern features. Otherwise stated, CSI follows a traditional crime-story pattern but considerable post-modern characteristics are at work on the level of presentation.

There is an obvious correlation between the visual representation of bodies and their forensic transcription via pathological discourse. The re-enlivening of bodies is re-inscribed into the context of testimony, where language becomes descriptive and constitutive at the same time: CSI plays upon an intriguing contrast between the positing of the dead body as a mute, voiceless entity and as that which tells its story. The language of science is mobilized as a language of testimony:  the primary concern and premise of the forensic profession is to speak for the dead, to make bodies tell their stories. As Sara Sidle points out in Season 1 Episode 10, “We’re the victim’s last voice.” The “speaking body” is pivotal to testimony. It operates as a quintessential trope for the investigators’ approach to the body while processing it as evidence. The “voicing up” of the mute body accentuates the proximity of the traumatized bodies of the victims and the heavily stylized, beautified bodies of the scientists. In other words, testimony resides in the visual representation of bodies and their forensic transcription via pathological discourse. It is through the contribution of language that the body transforms from fragmented and chaotic flesh into a meaningful discourse.

Although there is a kind of an effacement of the body in favor of verbal description, there is also the intense visual focus of the show: the sophisticated use of computer graphics, animation sequences, the stylized  presentation of the lab (lighting, framing, etc.), not to mention physically pleasing actors, all contribute to the “sexing up” of the visuals. All of these elements put the body “back into the scene,” so to speak, creating an interesting counterpoint between the visual and verbal elements of the show (from dialogue to commentary over procedure to the insertions of pieces of narrative prose during flashbacks). However, such instances of linguistic testimony are always juxtaposed with the technological mediation of vision. As Gever reminds us:

The virtuoso display of digital videographics used in these close-up zooms boring into human bodies, recall the pictures produced by medical endoscopy. But despite their dependence on state-of-the-art special effects – hybrid images made up of photographs and films of props, virtual 3D models, digital 3D animation and photographic texture mapping – these scenes faithfully recapitulate the authority of the medical gaze – that is, knowledge about human life gained through visual perception that date back several centuries. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault (1975[1963]) describes the dissection of corpses that became commonplace in European hospitals and medical schools during the mid-18th century. He maintains that these autopsies provided epistemological support for the rationalization of knowledge about disease and health. Foucault’s précis of the lessons learned from autopsies is: “That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body.” (457)

As a consequence, the show’s reliance on advanced imaging technologies has to do with more than just heightened visual aesthetics. They also play a pivotal role as affective media, as somatechnics - supplanting the logic of “and” in the juxtaposition of soma and techne (cf. Sullivan 2014, 188). While the screen, the microscope, the x-ray and even the camera filming the events function as focalizers, they also acquire a prosthetic function operating as the extensions of sight. CSI’s medical gaze is mediated through these technologies, and by mediating also the body and its traumatic experience they enable both the investigators and the viewers “to decipher and reconstruct what the body has undergone, and how it came to grief” (Palatinus 2013).

One emblematic visual effect used in the program is the so-called CSI-shot that comprises the application of a virtual camera floating into the body through orifices or wounds in order to reveal internal cavities, organ deformations and tissue damage. The relevance of this technique is that it allows the eye to become kinesthetic, although this kinesthesia is only virtual, as the eye does not move in space in reality. These shots exemplify Foucault’s medical gaze. Gever explains its significance as follows:

Doctors once sought new knowledge about disease, and therefore health, in anatomized, anonymous cadavers. CSI extends and resituates the knowledge provided by the performance of autopsies as diagnoses of social pathology. But in order to do this the social body must be visualized, constituted as information and made knowable by employing scientific instruments and procedures. Enter, once again, the police wielding gear devised to visualize, and generate knowledge about, the social landscape and those who inhabit it. (458)

The interrelation of soma and techne becomes most plausible in depictions of autopsy, and the spectacular representations of CSI’s anatomical theatres as the apparatus par excellence of (corpo-real) mediation. Autopsy is central to the concept of forensic science (fictioned or actual) for multiple reasons. Not only because its representation on the screen constitutes an essential, often climactic plotpoint, but also because autopsy is that which brings its spectators to close proximity to what’s beyond the surface of the body. Autopsy reveals, exposes the body to sight, it takes the spectator literally behind the scene. Autopsy has to do with the secret. And by subverting the secrecy of the secret, it links the inside to the outside. In this sense, autopsy is an act of violence, a transgression that penetrates surfaces. But on the other hand, it is also an act of intimacy – precisely because of the proximity of bodies. The modern idea of autopsy bundles together two empiricist functions: looking an analyzing, as evidenced by the etymology of the term: auto-opsis, that is, to see with one’s own eyes, and ana-tome, to cut up.

To better understand its significance, we need to briefly address the tactility of vision. Jacques Derrida offers a curious interpretation for the interdependence of seeing and cutting: in Memoirs of the Blind (1993) he posits a close connection between drawing (graphein – the working of the hand) and surgery (kheirurgia – handiwork), and claims that sight eventually depends on the experience of the invisible – sight is informed by touch, by the groping hand of the blind apprehending space. Touch becomes the prosthesis of seeing. This transfer, the prosthetic supplementation of one sense by another discloses the interdependence of haptic agency and the technics of seeing: the working of the hand becomes the context, the “media” of sight inasmuch as it brings out in-sight in the one who touches (cf. Palatinus 2013). Haptic vision is consequently transgressive since it penetrates the impenetrable: while the scalpel of the pathologist performs the touch that opens up the corpse to sight, the reappropriation of the medical gaze by haptic agency seemingly reinscribes vision into a neo-platonic view of perception where perception creates its objects (cf. Stafford 2008, 33-34). In other words, seeing is not as straightforward as it may look like. Seeing is dynamic, and performative. Both autopsy and the CSI-shot provide examples of practice for the tactile character of vision: the moving camera in the latter supplements the scalpel, allowing the eye to become kinesthetic, even if this kinesthesis is technologically mediated and virtual. The CSI-shot entails a reversal where passive spectatorship and disembodied vision are subverted (but at least challenged) by virtual kinesthesis. If we were to account for spectatorial agency in this mediated kinesthesis, we have to assume that the embodiment of agency is connected to the haptic. The CSI-shot becomes the embodiment par excellence of haptic vision. By the same token, the hapticity of vision also indicates that the anatomical theatre, where kheirurgia takes place, really functions as an apparatus, as a camera obscura the fourth wall of which is the TV screen itself (Palatinus 2013).

This is the point where the relevance or CSI’s screen aesthetics becomes explicit: if we accept that one of the main fascinations and fears of post-modernism is the fragmentation of the body proper, then there might be two key factors that might explain the success and popularity of the offending, voyeuristic, posthuman imagery of the series. The apparatus re-positions the forms of transgression: the corpse is posited as abject - not as grotesque and unclean, but as that which “calls into question borders” (Oliver 1997, 225) and as that which is itself on the borderline: as Kristeva explains, the sight of a cadaver is horrifying, appalling and fascinating at the same time, and the subject recognizes it as that which was once living, the “presence of signified death” (1997, 231). She argues that “as in true theatre, without makeup or masks […] the corpse shows me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (231). Simply put, the show promises to satisfy the desire to gain and maintain control over the chaos of corporeality. And secondly, the illusion of control is created through vision, through the theatre of spectacle; the visual effects, the over-representation of technology, offer the fiction of an infallible, objective and omnipotent science.

The socio-cultural implications of CSI demonstrate that episteme is always “haunted by the spectre of technology” (Lowry 1999, 283). It always presupposes an apparatus that can be – and eventually is – manipulated. CSI on the one hand clearly links medical episteme to the use of hard technologies – raising technological awareness on part of the audience. But on the other hand, quality television itself is trapped by the technological apparatuses that render the representation of science a matter of aesthetic curiosity. Technics indicates that the question of screen-aesthetics is closely linked to both tekhne (that is, the hard technologies on the screen and the hard technologies of the screen) and episteme (meanings and forms of knowledge these technologies generate). Accordingly, CSI as a meta-narrative of applied medicine functions not only as a form of education or popular televisual entertainment, but also as the embodiment of the episteme that shapes the social, political and economic profile of the forensic profession, and contributes to the understanding of technics as an inherent asset of culture. The corpse still calls into question borders: between construction and performance, selfhood and otherness, identification and difference. The representation of medical and investigative practices in CSI is bound to question the binary oppositions of hospitality and violence, and renders autopsy not only a matter of scientific/aesthetic curiosity but also the trope of social pathology.

Works Cited

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Weissmann, Elke and Karen Boyle: “Evidence of Things Unseen: The Pornographic Aesthetic and the Search for Truth in CSI.” In Reading CSI: Crime TV under the Microscope, edited by Michael Allen, 90-103. London: I.B. Tauris.

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“THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY”: THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DETECTION IN THE BLACK MIRROR

ZÉNÓ VERNYIK

While many consider computer games essentially non-narrative in nature, the present article, through its analysis of the point-and-click adventure, and more specifically the Czech computer game The Black Mirror (Future Games 2003), illustrates that a narrative approach might not be inappropriate in some cases, and shows that it is crucial in forming an understanding of point-and-click adventures in particular. Further, with an aim both to call attention to the complexity and possibly unique nature of The Black Mirror and to call into question the tenability of the claim that the point-and-click adventure is a (semi)dead genre (Vranešević 2014, 22–23;  Cox 2012), it analyzes how this game constantly undermines the player’s expectations and their ability to identify with the controlled character through its masterful adaptation of the metaphysical or postmodern detective story to the point-and-click adventure format.

Although there are several schools and trends in interpreting computer games, the claim that computer games are not narratives, and thus should not be interpreted as such, is a central tenet of many articles and volumes devoted to the field. David Myers, for example, claims that “narrative forms are incongruous and frequently dysfunctional when applied within interactive computer game designs,” because he considers the aesthetics of interaction as a “more fundamental form” than what he calls “poetic form” and by which he means narrative structures (2010, 73). In his view, whereas all narration is fundamentally intra-linguistic, interactive interaction is “either supra- or meta-lingual in nature” (Myers 2010, 73).

Espen Aarseth goes even further when he claims the following:

The sheer number of students trained in film and literary studies will ensure that the slanted and crude misapplication of “narrative” theory to games will continue and probably overwhelm game scholarship for a long time to come. As long as vast numbers of journals and supervisors from traditional narrative studies continue to sanction dissertations and papers that take the narrativity of games for granted and confuse the story-game hybrids with games in general, good, critical scholarship on games will be outnumbered by incompetence, and this is a problem for all involved. (2004, n.p.)

In other words, he not only claims that understanding video games as narratives is a mistaken approach, but insinuates that this is the result of an uncritical application of models and theories that experts originally trained outside the field of video games studies use as a result of their background. In fact, he seems to basically equate this approach, or at the very least if it is used uncritically, with incompetence and unprofessionalism.

Of course, it is easy to see that this attitude is, at least to some extent, both well-founded and reasonable. There are indeed many games which are evidently not narrative in nature. As Clive Fencott et al. explain:

Tetris [(Pajitnov 1984)] is the best example we can think of. We’ve played it ourselves for hours but it never occurred to us that it was a story of any sort. We could tell stories afterwards about what we did right and what we did wrong and how we were just lucky that we got the right piece at the right time and completed four rows all at once; but there is no story in the way that there is in Shenmue [(Sega 1999)], for instance. (2012, 48–9)

And while Tetris is indeed an excellent example, one could easily mention numerous other ones, or even whole genres: Minesweeper (Johnson 1990), card games of all sorts, and picture puzzles seem particularly revelatory.

At the same time, the opposite extreme, sandbox games, are just as problematic from the perspective of narrative analysis. As Yen-Ru Shi and Ju-Ling Shih explain, a “sandbox game contains an open virtual world that players can roam freely, and tools are provided for players to modify the world themselves” (2015, 3). Because this is so, they “do not suggest a particular method of solution” (Raczkowski 2012, 73–4), nor mostly even a particular direction of development. This leads to a virtually, or in some cases practically unlimited set of possible narratives, and thus any analysis could, at most, talk of what Clive Fencott et al. termed “narrative potential”:

The narrative which builds up will not be one predetermined by the author but one based on the possibilities on offer as you make choices and progress through the game. It is your job as player to make a particular realization of these possibilities; that is how you exercise narrative potential. Many games offer the aesthetic pleasure of narrative potential and we will therefore add this to our characterization of computer game aesthetics as being more generally applicable than “story.” (2012, 49)

Yet, however useful this concept may be as an analytical tool, the case stands that this game type does not have a single, fixed story to discuss, while other concepts, such as interaction, space, aesthetic pleasure could be used equally as well, or even more effectively, in analyzing the game play. What makes this particularly important to stress is that the sandbox experience is central to many recent and not so recent games and popular genres: one “might apply the term to simulation games like Civilization [(Meier and Shelley 1991)], Age of Empires [(Ensemble Studios 1997)] or The Sims [(Maxis 2000)]” (Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 25), or to “Second Life [(Linden Lab 2003)] and its various kindred virtual worlds […] in which you can create a place of your own to live in; can create objects, such as clothes, furniture, and houses; and can live out a life of your choosing” (Fencott et al. 2012, 80), not to mention some action-adventure games, most notably Grand Theft Auto (DMA Design 1997), “the pre-eminent ‘sandbox’ game” (Tavinor 2009, 100).

Yet, just because narratology is demonstrably not applicable to many genres, it would be nevertheless an extreme position to completely banish it from the study of computer games. As Connie Veugen explains, “as [some] games employ narrative practices comparable to those used in books and films, we can still borrow techniques and terms from literary and film studies, provided that we remain aware of the differences, as every medium has its specific techniques for telling a story” (2012, 47). And an essentially identical view is held about the applicability of narrative theory to some computer games by Daniel Martin Feige, who concedes that “it is easy to see that [narratology] can handle important aspects of […] narrative games,” at least as long as one is aware that “the specific way computer games narrate in contrast to movies or literature has to be clarified” (2012, 99).

The point-and-click adventure, as a genre, could be considered as one of those which offer themselves for such an analysis, even if with some reservations. As Goran Vranešević  explains:

the genre always moves on the border between too much and too little, an almost non-interactive narrating of the story where we are placed in the role of an observer of events on the screen or the opposite tendency of over-emphasis on the non-narrative approaches such as combative sequences, mini-games or upgrades to the character. (2014, 27)

While the story itself is narrative, the puzzles one has to solve to get further are not, nor is the game interface itself. In fact, some, such as Connie Veugen would go as far as to claim that “in the adventure game genre, the term bases on the game skills exploration, locating objects and puzzle solving,” and the story is little else than the content communicated by this tripartite structure (2012, 52). Yet, Vranešević’s idea of a genre epitomized by the internal tension of narrative and non-narrative elements seems more fruitful to me, primarily since the heavily pre-scripted nature of these games, in fact, seriously limits the freedom one experiences while exploring the environment through the point-and-click interface. While pressing the button to click, the player is merely “selecting predefined verbs (push, open, use, walk, pick up, etc)” (Vranešević 2014, 26), and although it depends on the player when, with whom and in what order the controlled character engages in a dialog, it nevertheless also happens “through predefined questions” (27), not to mention that the very motivation for the character (and thus the player) to explore, locate and solve puzzles is to unravel the mystery offered by a story. In other words, however important this internal tension of non-narrative means to achieve a narrative goal are, it remains clear that in the point-and-click adventure genre “[t]he course of the story takes precedence over all other elements of the game” (27).

Yet, even if the claim that point-and-click adventures are essentially narrative in nature in itself goes against the seeming consensus that computer games are better not analyzed as narratives at all, I nevertheless intend to go a step further. In this article, I postulate that in essence, the narrative framework of this genre is in many ways identical with that of the detective story. After all, Vranešević emphasizes that “since their inception, adventures revolved around the mechanism of questioning by which the player uncovers clues, hints and traces” (27). And while he identifies the mechanism through which the player is “looking for bare signs on the basis of which [they] assemble a story or a more specific interpretation of the circumstances” (27–28) with the basic scenario of psychoanalysis, it is hard not to notice its equally striking identity with the method of the solitary detective, even more so when Vranešević unwittingly continues to talk about the “mundane exploration of the playing surface and repeated questioning of various figures, a sort of perverse fieldwork” (28). In fact, this commonality is also noticed by David Myers when he describes adventure games in general as follows:

A great many digital adventure games, for instance, are designed around problems associated with a Leonard-like memory deprivation. Indeed, in such games there always seems to be a Leonard-like character who doesn’t know who (or what) he is, or a robot that has had its memory wiped, or something similar. And then the whole purpose (or theme, or narrative) of these games is to recover missing information. This particular formal structure—often realized as a detective/mystery story, or, more generally, as a traversing of the labyrinth—appears again and again as a common narrative template in digital games. (2010, 83)

Note the use of terms such as “detective/mystery story,” “traversing the labyrinth” and “recover[ing] missing information” in the otherwise extremely cautious wording.

This shared set of methods and aims is not to be understood that all point-and-click adventures are detective stories, or at the very least not on the level of content. As Connie Veugen emphasizes, it is crucial to distinguish between these two layers. While all adventure games (not only point-and-click ones) seem to share a set of skills, namely “exploration, locating objects and puzzle solving,” the content itself is sufficiently unbound by the genre to allow for “many different themes such as science fiction, detective, horror, fantasy, espionage, history and the like” (Veugen 2012, 52). In other words, while all point-and-click titles are structurally stories of detection in terms of their basic and complete reliance on “uncover[ing] clues, hints and traces” (Vranešević 2014, 27) as well as because of the “perverse fieldwork” (28) of a “mundane exploration of the playing surface and repeated questioning of various figures” (27–28), in terms of the content this detection-based structure is filled with, point-and-click adventures have an impressively wide range. It is enough to think of such various titles as Maniac Mansion (Lucasfilm Games 1987) with its science fiction/horror/comedy content, The Secret of Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games 1990) and its sequels with their pirate adventure/comedy focus, the Syberia trilogy (Microïds 2002, 2004, 2016) with its adventure/detective/cyberpunk theme, or the Covert Front franchise (Skutnik and Konwerski 2007–2012) and its spy/cyberpunk universe.

The specific focus of this paper, The Black Mirror/Posel smrti (Future Games 2003) is an example, however, in which, as I am to show, the detection-based structure of point-and-click adventures coincides with a detective plot, even if only in order for that plot to be destabilized and then completely undermined by the game. In order to illustrate these points, I will overview the main features of classical detective stories, contrast them with the game’s universe and storyline, and then point out how the game turns what starts out as classical detection into a postmodern, metaphysical detective story.

As Martin Rosenstock explains, one of the most central postulates behind a classical detective story is the strong belief in human reason’s ability to understand the world and its workings (2007, 36). This is accompanied by another, equally crucial belief in “the abilities of the human being to perceive his surroundings correctly and in language to convey the truths arrived at by reason in conjunction with the sense perceptions transmitted to the mind” (Rosenstock 2007, 36). But these detective stories not only have presuppositions about the powers of the detective’s reason and her senses, but an accompanying set of postulates about the world itself: the belief “that reality is intelligible, that it adheres to unchanging laws, that the human being exists in a ‘rational’ universe” (Rosenstock 2007, 40). And finally, since the detective only sees the crime ex post facto, while at the same time she tries to reconstruct the events that led to this state, it also involves a strong faith in causal determinism:

Causal determinism and a detective story indulge the identical conceit, namely that causality determines events in an exclusive and singular fashion, thus enabling the subject to take a snapshot of the present and then to arrive at certain knowledge about the past by retracing the events back along the trajectory of time’s arrow. There is no room for chaos or uncertainty in this view of the world; knowledge is merely a function of intellectual rigor. (Rosenstock 2007, 43)

The introductory video of The Black Mirror seems to immediately contradict a universe which is knowable, rational and where senses are to be trusted. The dark manor house, set amongst dry trees, shown in the middle of a thunderstorm, immediately recalls the gothic genre, with its haunted mansions, ghosts and curses, with an abundance of the supernatural of all sorts, rather than the logical universe of the detective. This impression is only further strengthened by the camera wandering around the figure of William Gordon, showing him from a distance, suggesting someone else present in his study at the top of the tower, while a previous establishing shot has shown the room to be empty except for William himself. The fact that these shots are interleaved with an external camera sliding up along the walls of the tower, accompanied by strange voices, eventually reaching William’s window just in the moment when his candles are blown out, shortly before those very windows open as if by themselves, while William is shown thrust out of the room where he is supposedly alone only makes this impression even stronger.

Yet, this does not necessarily have to be the case. In Agatha Christie’s “The Mystery of the Blue Jar” ([1933] 2003), Jack Hartington seems to repeatedly hear the voice of an allegedly murdered woman, calling for him from death, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) starts out with the suspicion of a ghost dog haunting the family thanks to a curse. Yet, in both cases the detective proves that the supernatural phenomena are only illusory, and there is a perfectly rational explanation for everything, using his skills of deduction and observation.

And significantly enough, after the mysterious introductory video, the game itself starts out in accordance with the genre of the straightforward detective story. The controlled character, Samuel Gordon, whom William Gordon addressed in the letter he was writing before his death, arrives at the manor to attend William Gordon’s funeral. The official cause of death, established by the police, is suicide, yet Samuel is unsatisfied with this explanation and starts to investigate what happened. As he notices some inconsistencies in the official narrative, and he does not find suicide compatible with the personality of his grandfather as he knew him, he uses the very tools of the classical detective to find out more: he interviews suspects and witnesses alike, he gathers physical evidence, takes photos, keeps a diary of his findings and tries to make logical deductions based on what he knows, setting up theory after theory about what he considers as a case of murder.

Samuel Gordon’s position is that of the amateur detective, a position that is fairly frequent in detective stories, even if there are just as many professionals from Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq, through Colin Dexter’s Chief Inspector Morse to Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus. As John Samuel Harpham points out, the character of the amateur detective goes back to the very beginnings of modern detective stories: “Dupin is a private agent, the reclusive scion of ‘an illustrious family’; Tabaret is also an amateur, whereas Segmuller is a judge” (2014, 132).

And with the character of the amateur and/or private detective,[36] sharing the feature of being outside the official machinery of investigation, often appears that of the antagonizing and often incompetent police detective. To quote Harpham again, the “hero in this genre, the private detective, […] solves crimes that baffle the police,” at least partially “by being more brilliant or industrious than the police” (141). This rivalry between the protagonist-detective and the professional counterpart, one that is routinely won by the former, appears as a cliché in hard-boiled stories, but is also already there in classical whodunits. Harpham mentions two examples about Sherlock Holmes, for example: his encounter with “a skeptical local detective named Forrester” (138), and his hatred for Detective Lestrade (137).

The Black Mirror also builds on this antagonism, featuring Detective Collier, investigating the same case Samuel Gordon does. In terms of their methods and behavior, one could not ask for a more complete compliance to the tradition: while Samuel is stubbornly motivated, systematic and logical, Detective Collier is most apparent in his absence from key places and events, also, he repeatedly fails to base his theories on solid evidence of any kind, while the evidence gathered by Samuel clearly contradicts Collier’s claims throughout the game.

That is to say, even if there are marked elements of gothic and the supernatural, the detection-prone mode of the game’s point-and-click interface, the story behind that interface, and the rational working methods and skepticism of the controlled character and protagonist, Samuel, convince the player straight at the very beginning, or at the very least fairly early on that the game is a classical detective story, where thus the player’s role is to reveal the king of crimes, murder, behind a seemingly mysterious suicide, find the culprit(s) and uncover their motives. If the player’s expectations are correct, however, this means a set of conditions must be fulfilled:

The operative principles in the world of a classic detective story, questioned neither by the text nor by the detective, are those taken for granted in an age shaped by Enlightenment philosophy: that the human being can perceive reality truthfully, that the mind can explain this reality (which also means that nothing beyond the intelligible, that is supernatural or metaphysical, exists), that language can transmit the findings of the mind, that the effects of its work will improve man’s lot in life, and ultimately that the entire universe with all its phenomena, past, present, and future, is accessible to rational inquiry. (Rosenstock 2007, 46)

In other words, if there are any supernatural-looking elements, they can be explained rationally, it is possible to solve the mystery by detective methods, and the detective will be successful in its inquiry, which in turn makes the game universe a better place.

Further, if one then accepts the idea that in the point-and-click format, narration is predominant, one can theorize that Wolfgang Iser’s conception of the role of the reader in making sense of narratives might potentially apply to this game format, as well:

The literary text [or in this case the point-and-click adventure] creates gaps or fissures that readers [or in our case players] imaginatively fill to produce distinct readings […] By filling these narrative fissures, the reader [or player] attempts to construct a consistent pattern of meaning. (Roessner 1998, 12–13)

That is to say, throughout the time spent playing the game, the player “will strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern” regardless of the fact that their “expectations may be continually modified, and images continually expanded” by the game (Iser 1974, 283). Which means for the purposes of this paper that while the detective genre contributes expectations for a rational solution, for the use of classical detective methods, and for a successful detection leading to the reinstatement of harmony, the narrative aspect of point-and-click adventures adds the extra expectation on the player’s part that there will be a coherent story to the game.

Of course, the player’s expectation to be able to solve the mystery not only springs from the detective genre’s rooting in Enlightenment views, but also in the natural expectations of the player that a game can be won. As Caja Thimm explains, “[e]ven though it could be debated whether some games are low on competitive elements, it is still the idea of winning that drives most of the games at hand” (2012, 188), or as Konstantin Mitgush puts it, “[c]omputer games represent fantasies and follow the simple principle of winning or losing, with instant outcomes” (2012, 574). And if the controlled character in the game is a detective trying to solve the mystery, then winning, logically means doing just that, so the player who expects to win is right to expect to be able to unravel the said mystery.

Finally, since the controlled character is set early on in the game as somebody trying to catch a murderer, and thus re-instate law and order, it seems a logical expectation by the player to see him as an essentially positive character, standing on the side of morality. As David G. Hawkins explains, “[t]his genre is thoroughly moral. Within the basic human conflict between good and evil, evil is identified and its perpetrator is punished. The detective story possesses a moral seriousness, a message, a mission, and a conscience” (1990, 38). Or to quote Timothy R. Prchal, “[d]etective characters serve as […] exemplary objects in their enviable ability to solve mysteries and to maintain morality when characters around them fail” (1997, 30).

With all of these hopes and beliefs established what the player actually ends up experiencing in The Black Mirror is a progressive thwarting of all of their expectations about the story, and about the controlled character and protagonist, Samuel. As the player progresses in the narrative, finding clues and interpreting them, there are more and more signs that are at first only disquieting, but later positively undermining both the possibility of a successful and morally reassuring solution, and the very integrity of the protagonist-detective, both in terms of his rational and deductive abilities and in terms of his sanity and morality.

To start with, the game progressively undermines the player’s belief in the expertise of Samuel as a detective. One would expect him to be able to identify and catch the culprit, but that seems less and less likely as the initial murder is fast followed by more and more deaths, all of which are based on a similar pattern, and where the murderer leaves special signs at the place of the murder. While this might simply point in the direction of a serial murderer with a criminal mastermind, quite standard in the tradition of detective fiction, what makes a solution less and less likely is that once Samuel collects enough evidence to suggest a particular culprit, they become the next victim. This is the case with Henry, the gardener, with Robert, Samuel’s uncle, and with Dr. Hermann, the family doctor. This is further worsened by the fact that there appear to be some virtually random, innocent victims, whom the murderer fits into the same pattern of killings, but who are not connected with the case in any way by Samuel himself. This is the case of Vick, the village boy, and also that of James, Samuel’s grandfather’s illegitimate son.

In a similar vein, the gameplay also questions Samuel’s moral integrity, since he does not shy away from questionable and even unambiguously unethical methods in solving the case. He steals evidence from Dr. Hermann twice, once by sneaking into his house while an accomplice makes the doctor busy, and once through breaking into his locked garbage bin with a key made from an imprint. Similarly, he eavesdrops on the confession of the manor’s butler, Bates. At another point, he fakes an important chemical solution to get to some evidence, and thus seriously risks the life of Richard, the scientist, and also ruins months’ worth of Richard’s research results in the explosion. He likewise provides detective Collier with fake evidence to be able to steal actual evidence from under Collier’s nose. And finally, the player also finds out that Samuel’s wife died in a fire at the manor, and Samuel’s involvement in this accident is at the very least uncertain and dubious.

At the same time, Samuel’s status as a rational, logical and self-aware detective, in touch with reality, is also undermined as the player progresses in The Black Mirror. Samuel frequently has nightmares and visions that seem to foretell murders and their circumstances or help him in other ways to solve the mystery, and he actively builds on the knowledge gained this way. It also does not strengthen one’s beliefs in his clear mind and his responsibility for his own actions that he takes some sort of unspecified prescription drug for his headaches that he often suffers from, nor the fact that he frequently collapses and loses consciousness for long periods, after which he usually finds himself in his bed, without being able to account for the period between his loss and regaining of consciousness. And finally, as the game progresses, Samuel’s investigation becomes less about finding the culprit, and more about unraveling the mystery of an alleged curse on the firstborn males of the Gordon family since the middle ages. In relation to which, Samuel ends up looking less for the evidence of the crime, and more for various artifacts in tombs, crypts and dark chapels, believing more and more strongly that the latter are not only related to the former, but will reveal the solution to him. In other words, he progressively substitutes a mystical, occult approach for his original, evidence-based, logical, deductive method of inquiry, even going so far as to attempt to perform black magic in the interests of finding a solution.

Finally, the player’s already troubled identification with Samuel’s character and their understanding of Samuel as a character who is both able to catch the culprit and is essentially likeable, morally and mentally sound becomes untenable in the moment when it turns out that the detective and the (serial) murderer are the same person: Samuel himself. This realization is corroborated by the factual evidence, even if it plays at this point admittedly only a secondary role in Samuel’s investigation: all other potential murderers with black hair are dead, and the butler, Bates, names Samuel as the murderer in his confession to Father Frederick. Only one thing can be further from a successful and expected ending than this, and from “winning” the game in a traditional sense, and The Black Mirror does not refrain from making this happen as well: the game ends by Samuel committing suicide.

Thus, what looks at the beginning of The Black Mirror as a conventional, straightforward detective story in the detection-based genre of the point-and-click adventure turns out to be something more complex: a narrative game that constantly undermines the player’s expectations and progressively questions all of his beliefs about the game world and even makes his identification with the controlled character, Samuel, progressively more difficult and finally impossible. In pretending to be a classical detective story, with all of its bells and whistles, but only in order to undermine its credibility, the game does exactly what the postmodern or metaphysical detective story does:

Metaphysical detection calls into question structures taken for granted after Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841): the hermeneutic strategies of rendering meaningful those signs which are unintelligible to others, and of divining the mind of the opponent; the epistemological method of discovering truth by questioning sources of knowledge; and the adept detective’s triumph over the dangerous Other. Rather than denying the viability of its predecessors, metaphysical detection carefully doubles its precursors—deliberately, flamboyantly, ironically—in order to undermine them. (Ewert 2011, 179)

And it is easy to see that it is exactly what The Black Mirror does: Samuel is notoriously unable to read clues and signs, as his attempts always lead him to a false culprit. In fact, the mystery is not even solved by him, but by the butler, Bates, in a reluctant, rather than intentional fashion. The same can be said of Samuel’s questioning: while his interrogation, in combination with the already mentioned clues, helps him reveal various dark secrets about virtually every other member of the Gordon household (e.g. Robert’s illegal human experiments, William’s illegitimate son, or Henry, the gardener’s alcoholism), those secrets lead him rather further away from the mystery than help him solve it. And finally, rather than Samuel triumphing “over the dangerous Other” (179), his only way to avoid the triumph of that very Other over him and potentially the rest of the world is to kill himself.

Yet, from the retrospective vantage of the game’s end, what makes Samuel’s quest doomed from the very beginning, however incompetent he turns out to be, is not his lack of skills, but the fact that he himself is the murderer, without him being aware of it. As Jeanne C. Ewert puts it, “the detective doesn’t ‘fail’ to solve the crime, but rather turns out to have committed it,” thus even more efficiently undermining the traditional detective narrative than any extent of incompetence on the detective’s side ever could, as the detective being the murderer is easily identifiable as “perhaps the greatest failing of all in classical detection” (184). The game thus could be considered a prime example of the metaphysical or postmodern detective story in the medium, rather than genre, of the point-and-click adventure.

That is to say, the present paper illustrated that even if not all computer games can be fruitfully analyzed using models and frames of reference borrowed from narratology, some specific genres can. More specifically, point-and-click adventures can hardly be understood in their entirety without a recourse to a narrative interpretation thanks to their heavily pre-scripted nature, as well as their working mechanism. This mechanism, and the position and experience of the controlled character shares its fundamental methods and aims with that of the detective story and its detective, even if it is important to emphasize that this detection-based format can accommodate other fictional genres, as well, and the distinction between these two layers is crucial. Further, this paper analyzed The Black Mirror and showed that the game uses the detection-based format of the point-and-click adventure to accommodate a metaphysical or postmodern detective story, constantly undermining the player’s expectations and making their very identification with the controlled character problematic (or even impossible), a feature that I consider unusual for a computer game. Thus, even if the point-and-click adventure is not as popular as it used to be, if used properly, it can be significantly more complex than one would expect, and thus might deserve further attention, be it the attention of scholars or developers. Far from being a dead genre, one “whose shelf life has obviously expired some time ago” (Vranešević 2014, 23), and one that can only be “situated among the relics of history” (22), it has unexploited potential. Maybe even more so in the age of smart devices and computers with touch screens, where what could be more natural than to point and click, or simply touch.

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POPULAR CRIME AND POPULIST INVESTIGATION: THE CSI FRANCHISE AND MULTI-MEDIA PARTICIPATION

ELKE WEISSMANN

The worldwide success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000-2015) has attracted a number of publications which aim to understand the series’ popularity (Allen 2007, Byers and Johnson 2009, Cohan 2008, Kompare 2010). As a defining US series of the 2000s which had a significant impact on the representation of crime on television, it opens up several avenues of investigation, and I am here particularly interested in understanding CSI as paradigmatic for the ways the US television industries have come to engage with their audience. Television in the United States changed dramatically from the 1970s onwards when a combination of regulation—the FinSyn Rules (1972)—and a development in delivery technologies—in particular cable— brought a sense of economic crisis to the until then burgeoning industry. As John T. Caldwell (1995, 5) chronicles, this economic crisis, combined with changes in programming practices, the industry’s mode of production, and audience expectations affected the look of US television, but also had ideological implications. Caldwell emphasizes that the 1980s’ “televisuality” was a historically situated effect, though much of what he describes continues well beyond the decade, including the sense of crisis. Indeed, the US television industries continue to experience similar issues as they did in the 1980s, particularly as a result of audience fragmentation, which in the era of digitization, if anything, has become more exacerbated. My interest in CSI, then, is driven by the wish to understand how this sense of crisis has affected the relationship between the industry and its audience, and in particular how the attempts by the industry to harness popularity through merchandising and franchising has led to the creation of additional texts that engage the audience in particular ways.

CSI became crucial for CBS after the network executives realized its popularity with audiences. CBS originally understood the series to be a high risk production as the show was not driven by big stars and had been created by an unknown writer, Anthony E. Zuiker. Moreover, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, who was originally listed as coproducer, pulled out of the deal and was replaced by the Canadian owned Alliance Atlantic (Cohan 2008, 1–3). But the series garnered a loyal audience, and was strong enough to help CBS overtake NBC in the particularly lucrative Thursday primetime slot (Cohan 2008, 3). Eventually, the franchise was considered to be the most successful programme in the world (Reuters 2006) as it garnered sizeable audiences in some of the world’s largest television markets, including Germany. For CBS, then, the series was crucial in helping to return the network to the top of the Nielsen ratings, which had positive financial implications. As a result, CBS wasted little time and commissioned two further series—CSI: Miami (CBS 2002–2012) and CSI: NY (CBS 2004–2013)—as well as creating a wide range of merchandise, including DVDs, TShirts, novels, cups, video games, board games, baseball caps etc.

In the following, I want to analyse one of these extensions, namely the Facebook game: CSI: Crime City. As an extension of the brand, the game draws on key elements of the series and plays them through for the audience that engages with it. This chapter attempts to unravel how, in offering the fans something extra, the producers define their relationship with the fans, and more importantly, the fans’ relationship with the series in particular ways that is ultimately unsuccessful as is evidenced in the rather tepid reactions of the fans to the game. In order to understand the resulting dissatisfaction amongst fans, the article will draw on a number of theoretical frameworks, including literature on branding, new media, and Ernesto Laclau’s (2005) discussion of populism. I draw on Laclau’s work in particular in order to provide a counterbalance to the current debates on new media, participation and audiences which tend to be split into two mutually exclusive camps. On the one hand several scholars (see amongst others Turkle 1997, Jenkins 2008) celebrate new media for their participatory potential, while on the other hand researchers point to the limitations of this participation, particularly as far as the impact on the central (programme) text is concerned (Carpentier 2011). Although Carpentier’s work attempts to grapple with the complexities of possibilities in terms of audience engagement by drawing up a gradation of participation, his model cannot fully explain the intricacies of mutual interdependence that exists between producers and audiences. Laclau’s model of populism, although it was developed to understand political populism, is useful in this context. The article will largely be theoretical, but will draw on textual analysis (Creeber 2006) and netnography (Kozinets 2006) in order to provide some evidence. A more fully-fledged empirical study needs to be reserved for a different time due to constraints of space. The following section then will set up the parameters of the analysis and discuss why the Facebook game must be understood as an example of failed populism.

Television, Brands and New Media Extensions

An increasing number of publications (see ChanOlmsted and Kim 2001, Bellamy and Traudt 2000 etc.) respond to the more extensive branding strategies of all industries. Many of these publications approach branding purely from the point of view of marketing. Celia Lury (2004), in contrast, situates branding within the larger context of communication and argues that brands function as media where brand owners connect with brand users to define the values incorporated in the brand. Each additional product changes the brand, just as the specific take-up of the product—its specific uses by audiences—determine its meanings. As a result, brands allow for a two-way flow of communication, which allows for the input of users into the meaning of the brand. Thus, the specific use of audiences can determine what “CSI” comes to stand for: whilst certain parameters will remain unchanged, for example its connections to the crime genre, its focus on forensics as means of investigation etc., new elements, such as a focus on specific relationships, could theoretically be added. However, as Lury (2004) highlights, brand owners—i.e. the media companies behind CSI—have little or no interest in opening the brand up to audiences, and indeed often create a legal framework that ensures that the brand values remain defined by brand owners.

As Catherine Johnson (2012, 4) indicates, television, through advertising and marketing, centrally contributes to the definition and closing down of brand qualities and values if these qualities and values belong to products other than television. Branding television itself, however, is more complicated. Here, two brands emerge which can be relatively easily identified: the programme brand and the broadcaster/channel brand. These need to intersect and inform each other (Johnson 2007). Thus, CSI’s programme brand—of a slick, but generic, if “different” crime drama—needs to connect to the CBS brand, the Channel 5 brand in the UK, the RTL brand in Germany etc. As Paul Rixon (2006) points out, each importing broadcaster assimilates (and thereby changes) the programme to fit its own needs. In terms of branding, this can involve a complete redefinition of core brand values, as Paul Grainge (2009) shows in relation to the assimilation of Lost into the UK’s Channel 4 brand strategy. In addition to these two intersecting brands, a third brand, namely that of the corporation, impacts on the relationship between product, channel and audiences (Johnson 2012). This suggests that television brands consist of a group of intersecting relations which are largely controlled by television institutions, and not by audiences. It also draws attention to the fact that any extension of a brand into a different medium (such as a video game console or a social media website) will inevitably have to renegotiate the brand values through the prism of the new medium brand.

The emphasis on the role of ownership in the literature on branding appears at first glance to be antagonistic to a large number of publications investigating the uses of new media. In particular, early scholars of new media (e.g. Turkle 1997, Gimmler 2001, Bucy and Gregson 2001) express a deep sense of optimism in relation to the participatory potential of new media.  Indeed, Antje Gimmler (2001) goes as far as to propose that the internet could form a new public sphere which could be used for political deliberation and decision making. Jingsi Wu (2011) indicates that in countries such as China where there is little space in the political process to make democratic decisions, programmes such as Super Girl (Hunan Satellite Television, 2004–2006, the Chinese, unlicensed adaptation of Pop Idol, ITV, 2001–2003) enable viewers to practice democratic models, thus contributing to the opening up of China towards democratic ideals. But even in societies which understand themselves to be democratic, such as the USA, new media have largely been celebrated as a means to democratize the consumption processes of traditional media and enable wider participation that feeds back into program texts (Jenkins 2008, Gillan 2011, Ross 2008). Thus, brand extensions into new media appear to offer the creation of the two-way flow of communication between brand owners and users. Indeed, the participatory nature of new media, both Ross (2008) and Jenkins (2008) argue, enables better feedback loops which allow for the incorporation of audience ideas into program texts.

The literature that celebrates new media as a space of participation and interaction, however, often subscribes to technologically deterministic views and has been met by a similar if not larger number of publications that express concern about the participatory potential of new media. For example, Andy Bennett (1999) highlights that rather than organizing a coherent, united public sphere, the internet helps to organize us into tribes that congregate as a result of shared taste cultures. These tribes can be international, but are rarely political in nature. Natalie Fenton (2012) goes further by drawing attention to the fact that the move to taste cultural tribes actually de-democratizes us, as it distracts us from the business of politics. Moreover, these publications criticize the literature which celebrates the potential of new media as indicative of a wider discourse around new media where the possibilities of the technologies overshadow understandings of their use (McFarlane and Thornham 2013), or perhaps more importantly, where these possibilities overshadow actual change (Kember and Zlyinska 2012). On a more fundamental level, however, several publications (Carpentier 2011, Ziegfeld 1989) highlight that interaction—including clicking or liking—is often misunderstood as participation. Acts such as clicking actually only facilitate linear, or even nonlinear narratives on the web: “if you want to find out more, click here.” In other words, clicking is comparable to choosing a particular channel on television. Liking, on the other hand, seems to offer a participatory element as what we do here is vote. But there are two issues with that. As Fenton (2012) rightly highlights, voting is often restricted to areas of entertainment (baby or cat videos on YouTube, The XFactor (ITV since 2004), Big Brother (Veronica, 1999–2000) or I’m a Celebrity… Get me out of Here (ITV, since 2002) on television). But on the other hand, such forms of participation can be understood as minimalist (Carpentier 2011): they give an indication of personal preferences but rarely have a true impact on the text. Considering that we supposedly “decide” the outcomes of programs such as The XFactor, this might seem counterintuitive. However, these programs channel participation in ways that are predictable and basically only determine the name of the winner—but not the structure of the program itself (Carpentier 2011). In other words, the creative input of audiences is non-existent.

Much of this is due to how the business is now regimented—even if it has become increasingly deregulated (Johnson 2012). As Jody Smith (multiplatform commissioning editor for comedy and entertainment for Channel 4) said at the 2013 Salford Media Festival, within a commercial system, where money is necessarily being made from creative ideas, using material generated by audiences is a legal nightmare: the question becomes who owns intellectual property. Of course, this is particularly important to British producers who have made an art out of selling ideas internationally in format bibles (Esser 2009, 2013), but it also applies to the US context: whilst the sale of formats has become more important in that country too, the sale of completed episodes creates a similar problem in terms of intellectual property because the sale of finished material across national borders nevertheless requires the stipulation of licenses for sales across the world in each participant’s contract which is impossible to do if the participants are not known well in advance. All in all then, we have to approach the participatory potential of new media with a lot of critical analysis. As Carpentier (2011, 271) highlights, media technologies are embedded in organizational, social and cultural structures which determine how they are used. Technologies cannot be understood as neutral, then, because they are being used—also by media corporations.

In the following, however, my aim is to complicate both positions. I want to indicate that the extension of brands into the online world does not necessarily have to imply a closing down of brand values and qualities, even if, in the case of CSI: Crime City it does. This requires first a more detailed understanding of the populist and its application to media use.

The Concept of the Populist

Laclau’s concept of the populist was developed in order to complicate the reductive debates on populism in politics. Laclau emphasizes that his aim is to highlight the similarities in different populist projects—not just right-wing ones—in order to understand the appeal of populism on the one hand and their failure on the other. Drawing on several apparently unconnected areas of theory, including linguistics, and in particular semiotics, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyses, he develops a complex theory that recognizes the role of affect as well as equivalence chains.

Unlike other writers on populism, the smallest unit he assesses is not “the people” but that of social demand. Indeed, he argues, that it is the articulation of a specific social demand that is shared by a number of groups that helps to constitute “the people.” “The people,” then, is not a preexisting unit, but one that needs to be constructed from a number of differentiated, but equivalent demands. This has several effects: first, “the people” is defined by its relation to a lack in society. Thus, although it at first seems focused on “the plebs,” the excluded, the populist needs to reframe this lack to include, and construct, “the populus,” the people as a whole. But Laclau goes even further by highlighting that “the plebs” as a partiality already includes the construction of the universal, and thus inevitably includes “the populus” which becomes apparent when the populist, through a series of social demands, constructs the people as a whole. And second, by doing this, the populist relies on a heterogeneous understanding of society, but at the same time constructs a hegemony. Such a hegemony is created by developing a series of equivalences that are unified through one identified social demand which is expressed as a general and universal lack in society. Third, the populist needs to use an empty signifier in order to incorporate all these heterogeneous demands. Fourth, it often relies on a charismatic leader or centre who comes to signify these demands and becomes the empty signifier.

The advantage of Laclau’s definition of the populist is that he recognizes the process of constructing the social group, “the people,” through the experience of identification of what he calls “populist reason”: the moment when a number of social demands are converted into a series of equivalences that are unified through an empty signifier. Put simply, it’s the populist that constructs the group, not the other way round. This has several benefits for this project: first, it does not rely on an assumed opposition between media institutions and audiences; second, it recognizes that the (assumed, and articulated) audience is actually constructed from a number of audiences; third, it nevertheless allows for a recognition of issues of power and hierarchies; and fourth, it emphasizes process and recognizes that these power relations can change and are more complex than a simple opposition. In addition, Laclau’s model allows media scholars to return the debates from the emphasis on consumptive behaviour (and commercial imperatives) to that of cultural needs.[37]

How might this look for the CSI franchise? The popularity of CSI does not simply stem from one identifiable consumptive behavior, but rather rests on a number of different (but equivalent) cultural needs which have until then been unfulfilled. Importantly, these needs might not have been conscious or articulated, but rather become clear through the process of identification as a “fan of CSI.” In other words, there were several things lacking or missing in the existing television output that CSI was able to fulfil. These equivalent needs can be subsumed under the larger cultural demand for “more CSI” and cover, amongst others, the demand for more “pure” crime drama (without emphasis on the relationship between detectives), the demand for more visually stunning TV drama, the demand for more of William Petersen or Marg Helgenberger or any of the other cast, the demand for more forensic-based crime drama, the demand for crime drama that develops its narrative in a particular way, the demand for access to one or several audiences (this coming from different institutions involved in producing CSI), and the demand for a good career and remuneration (coming from any of the crew involved in producing CSI). So already, we see that the social group is quite heterogeneous, but brought together as a group by the demand for “more CSI” and can perhaps be defined as a group of people who care about the program.[38] In order for these demands to be brought together, however, an empty signifier is needed—which in this case is “more CSI”—and, perhaps more importantly, someone to articulate the empty signifier: Laclau’s charismatic leader. In this respect, CSI has had a much more difficult task at hand than perhaps some other series, particularly those with a clearly defined showrunner, or in older cases, writers, such as Joss Whedon for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (The WB, UPN, 1997–2003), Stephen Bochco for any of his work, Russel T. Davies for both Queer as Folk (C4, 1999–2000) and Doctor Who (BBC One since 2005), Dennis Potter for his work, or, in one of the rare cases with a woman at the helm, Ann Biderman for SouthLAnd (NBC, 2009, TNT, 2010–2013). But as already indicated, Anthony E. Zuiker appeared too inexperienced, though some interviews indicate that there was an attempt to establish him as “charismatic leader” for a short time, while Jerry Bruckheimer, as producer, was perceived as too much focused on mass appeal blockbusters to provide something different and identify gaps. For a while it looked as if William Petersen, who not only fronted the cast but was also one of the key producers of the series, might take on the role, though his departure from the starring role made this more difficult. The role of the charismatic leader, therefore, remained unoccupied, which implied that the articulation of what “more CSI” meant was largely left in the hands of the producing and commissioning institutions (including CBS, but also Alliance Atlantis, RTL in Germany etc.) who have no other means of communicating this articulation than through, on the one hand, branding, and on the other, brand extensions and merchandising. It is for this reason, as I will show, that CSI’s attempts to create a universe for the fans that they experienced as satisfying were largely unsuccessful. The following provides a largely theoretical discussion of the issues at hand, though some (limited) evidence drawn from internet ethnography[39] will provide further back up.

Watching CSI

CSI is both a crime narrative and a broadcast series which follows a number of recognizable conventions, including its episodic form (Creeber 2004), its overreliance on stories about murder (Boyle 2005) and its emphasis on a narrative structure of equilibrium, disruption, working through which leads to the solution and the reestablishment of the initial equilibrium in its amended form (Todorov 1977). Despite these well-established generic conventions, or perhaps because of them, the television series provides many spaces for the audience to intersect and interpret the program along a range of negotiated positions (Morley 2000). The following attempts to unravel some of the spaces to intersect by highlighting different aspects of the series that might be at the center of a viewer’s interpretation.

One aspect of the series which evidently remains compelling to audiences in the US and beyond, as the proliferation of crime narratives on television indicates, is its interest in crime. In part, this is the result of crime narratives being able to allow audiences to explore moral and ethical issues as Thomas Leitch (2002) rightly argues. Julia Kristeva’s (1996) concept of the abject is helpful to understand why this is compelling: CSI, even more than other crime dramas on television, revolves largely around murder. In part, this is connected to the centrality of the body and the process of DNA analysis for forensics, a relatively new methodology which had become increasingly sophisticated (and well known) as a result of the Human Genome Project, which got under way in 1990, only 10 years before CSI first aired on CBS. But CSI’s focus on the body is also part of its specific aesthetics of affective spectacle (Lury 2005) which moves the viewer’s body. With its emphasis on gore and bodily fluids, CSI borrows heavily from the horror genre in order to emphasize the body as “the ultimate abject” (Kristeva 1996) which threatens both social and individual boundaries and hence requires exploration in order to be resolved. Crime narratives therefore allow us to engage with two key issues relating to our identity: what does it mean to be human who is a body that will die and rot away one day? And what does it mean to be a human being within the context of a fragile social contract which can so easily be disturbed through violence? The investigation plot of the series which not only establishes whodunit, but probably more importantly—why—allows us to reexamine the workings of this social contract and reframe it if necessary. Importantly, the crime narrative allows us to question the ethical and moral underpinnings of our social contract, draw attention to its weaknesses and hence—potentially—improve it.

All of this, of course, means that crime narratives are engaging. But they also offer a level of semiotic uncertainty (Hall 2000): there are spaces to intersect, to interpret and understand the text in line with our social and cultural identities. Our previous encounters with crime and television drama as well as any other social and cultural experiences furthermore determine our hermeneutic horizons (Gadamer 1965) which will influence where the interpretative process starts and ends. In many ways, then, this linear, one-directional medium of broadcasting with its generic boundaries offers a sense of interactivity that Marshall McLuhan (1994) described in relation to “cold media.” McLuhan’s problematic proposition was based on technologically deterministic assumptions about television being low definition (because at the time of writing, images were small and resolution low, requiring us to talk to each other in order to get the meaning of television images). However, we now know enough about audiences, their complex relationships to media, the role of their previous experiences to the process of interpretation (Morley 2000) and indeed the fact that audiences are also constituted socially (Thornham 2011, Hills 2002) that we can make a stronger argument for the importance of social interaction in our understanding of media content.[40] If anything, new media have made this more visible (Jenkins 2000, Gillan 2011).

But CSI is also spectacular—and it engages a deliberate “quality of the surface” (Goode 2007) which relies on audiovisual spectacle rather than narrative depth. As Tom Gunning (1990) has argued, early cinema similarly used such a visual spectacle of making things seen which captured some of the spirit and energy of working class culture precisely because it wasn’t closed down by narrative. This energy, this synergy, and the semiotic and hermeneutic uncertainty, opens audiovisual communication up to a variety of audiences, and we can see how CSI draws on elements of this. On the one hand, it does present us with a linear narrative which unfolds a fabula—the crime narrative (Allan 2007). At the same time, the way it presents us this narrative is by drawing on elements of televisuality (Caldwell 1995) and flexinarrative (Nelson 1997): the focus is less on presenting causal connections between elements of narrative (this leads to that), but to provide visual and aural spectacle, and to engage the viewer affectively (Weissmann and Boyle 2007). The emphasis on affect also implies an engagement with the content that goes beyond signification and hence allows for a sense of (embodied) experience. Whilst such an embodied experience might not quite have the power of symbolic encounters as imagined by Baudrillard (1993), it nevertheless suggests a deeper, more meaningful encounter than has traditionally been ascribed to media. Importantly within such an encounter also sit quite a few pleasures for audiences: the encounters with the abject and with the spectacular move us. It is CSI’s potential for multifaceted engagement—from narrative to the spectacular—that constitutes the foundations for its ability to be popular. It is important to emphasize that at this stage, CSI facilitates popular engagement, but does not close it down in order to harness the popular demand (see Laclau 2005). In other words, at this stage, the popular is constituted in our engagement with the text and remains extremely heterogenous, as the following discussion of viewer responses to the first season of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation makes evident. These responses were collected from the IMDB website. As it allows for the recognition of the country of origin which, in line with Rixon (2006), I assume, gives audiences different contexts and hence meanings through which they can understand the series. Whilst I appreciate that the posting audience on the IMDB is a small, self-selecting minority, and hence not representative of the overall audience, the reviews allow me to indicate that there are differences in understanding and cultural appreciation between different countries which suggests that CSI can satisfy several cultural demands.

The responses from the US range from an unqualified “best shows on television,” over an emphasis on the actors, and in particular William Petersen, and their ability to engage the audience, to the relationship to the Sherlock Holmes narratives of rational, scientific investigation, which is perceived as “dead on accurate.” British viewers similarly emphasize character, narrative and the representation of forensics, but there is also more evidence of evaluation of the style of the show, the use of music and spectacular visuality. Thus, audiences highlight the “stunning visuals,” the “ultrahip manipulation of new technology” and “the music of Pete Townsend, used to great effect.” There is also a surprising amount of criticism for the goriness of scenes which does not stand in the foreground of the American reviews. The German reviews are closest to the British ones, though what the British audiences seem to experience as problematic gore is understood as realistic detail in Germany. In addition, the German reviews indicate that the elements of humor, particularly as provided by the character of Gil Grissom (“the dry humor of Gil Grissom”), are an additional draw. The differences in responses highlights that the cultural needs covered by CSI are manifold and rely both on individual and national differences. Whilst in the US, CSI fulfils needs to do with actors, character, plot and narrative, British viewers are also attune to style—perhaps as a result of the perceived lack of similarly over-stylized series on British television. It is very noticeable that the aspect of humor plays no part in either the British or the American responses, suggesting that this might be either specific to the German temperament, or due to the translations of the dubbed German version. All in all, it highlights that CSI manages to unite a heterogeneous group of demands.

Playing CSI: Crime City

Crime City is a game that is available only on Facebook, a social networking site that facilitates multiple forms of interaction. At first glance, Facebook offers a space of true participation, which Carpentier (2013) defines as the interaction and mutual decision making of multiple actors who have the same status. However, in the case of a game, which is largely played by a single player, with only the occasional boost from other players (here in the form of energy from their “coffee cups”), the game rather seems to offer “interaction” which is channeled in particular ways by the organizations who control it. In that respect the game is another example of forms of “connected viewing” that largely aim to create particular forms of engagement in order to return power to media companies that perceive to have lost this power (Lee and Andrejevic 2014, Steirer 2014, Payne 2014). The game is designed as a treasure hunt (Ashby 2010), which means that the avatar searches different virtual spaces for “treasure”—here evidence. This is done by being propelled to different crime scenes where the avatar “searches” tiles by clicking them. Once evidence is found, it is taken to the lab, where it will be analyzed through different processes. In order to vary the game play, there are several other elements built into the game: the searching uses up energy which is only replenished through time or by drinking a coffee which can be gotten by “hopping into” another player’s lab (without them realizing, however). The avatar also increasingly moves up the ranks and with that comes more energy. Plus, in addition to finding evidence, the avatar also finds memorabilia and is given funding boosts which add up so that the player can buy new equipment which uses up less energy. In addition, the searching of locations is connected to larger crime narratives which are told through cutscenes which are, however, not interactive and are often lost sight of as the player waits for the energy to replenish. Overall, then, the narrative emphasis largely lies on the forensic investigation of crime scenes; other aspects such as the crime narrative or the spectacle of the abject body appear as less important. This suggests that the specific game format—but also the control of the powerful organizations (including Facebook, the developer UbiSoft, and the license holders of CSI—now CBS)—reduce the semiotic uncertainty that made the series popular. This becomes clearer when we consider the different aspects of the game contributing to this.

Crime City is clearly an extension of the CSI brand: it uses familiar imagery (including the helicopter shots of Las Vegas), characters and music and other aural elements of the series to reconnect the audience to the main brand object—the series. As Hazel Grian, interactive media producer, who worked amongst others on the multimedia and offline media campaign of Star Trek, indicated at a talk at the Salford Media Festival (2013), such extensions are usually funded by marketing and hence have to fulfil a certain purpose. Grian identified this as a problem, as the product is largely meant to take audiences back to the broadcast or film text (see also Lee and Andrejevic 2014) and create audience hype around the product, rather than allow for an experience that is meaningful in its own right and hence allows audiences to experience and create new meanings beyond the main brand object. Of course, these extensions are also about creating audience loyalty. Gillan (2011) is still quite celebratory in what that means for audiences, i.e. that there are spaces to congregate, that there is talk online which in her eyes is evidence of audience interaction. But what she fails to discuss is how this interaction has increasingly become focused on keeping audiences talking rather than offering a space for audiences to suggest ideas—the case of Joss Whedon listening to audiences online and expanding the universe was a blip; there is now increasing emphasis on harnessing audience interaction for marketing purposes (Andrejevic 2008). Whilst in some cases, such as the website Television without Pity which Andrejevic (2008) discusses, this does give the audience the space to intersect and reframe programs or games in creative and subversive ways, in the case of the CSI Facebook game it seems to close down meanings. Here, there is practically no space to interact: the player hunts for the treasure alone and can only engage with others by sharing their promotion, the fact that they have a cup of coffee waiting etc. on their timeline. Thus, there are surprisingly few opportunities to interact with others within the social media website. Instead, this particular extension of the brand should be understood in line with what Lury (2004) describes as a specific variation of the brand which reinforces key elements of it.

Other variations of the CSI brand, however, seem more open. As Allan (2007) shows, the novels present quite a bit of an extension in relation to character development, which in the television series remains minimal. While the novels do not provide all that much revelation—they are still primarily interested in murder cases and their solution—they do offer character insight via omniscient narration. The graphic novel, too, Allan argues, presents a little extension in relation to character development by means of visual innuendo. Finally examining the video game, Allan indicates that the video game seems to close down character development. Drawing on Juul (2005), he indicates that this is largely because character development is connected to a revelation of emotion, and emotions cannot be put into predictable rules in a way that video game programming requires. Allan nevertheless argues that the video game offers a sense of interactivity which mirrors the guessing along of the television viewer and the investigative processes of the CSI team themselves. The video game allows for wrong clues to be followed and the wrong people to be interviewed, meaning that there are rules programmed into the game that complicate the investigation plot and hence lead to (some) semiotic uncertainty. Because of the limitations of the Facebook game in terms of data memory and space, such following of wrong clues is severely limited even if the wrong people are interviewed as suspects. However, this is not an option, but automatically built into the Facebook game: as soon as the three pieces of evidence are processed, the game automatically takes you to the next interview. Thus, the player has little involvement in working out what clues actually mean or where they lead to—this is provided automatically by the game—rather the player is focused on finding the evidence at the crime scene. In addition, the game does not facilitate talk about narrative in the same way as television. Whilst much of our broadcast consumption is still live which means we are watching at the same time as others, and video games are often played together in small groups of friends (BARB 2014), the Facebook game is played individually, with very little chance that friends play at the same level. Thus, even talk about the game becomes focused on how to keep turning tiles for longer by getting more energy (as is evidenced by talk on different internet forums). As a result, however, there is also less space for the audience to intersect: talk about a text’s story allows for the individual to be confronted by different interpretations, opening up the understanding of the text and introducing further semiotic uncertainty. Here, this is closed down to talk about the text’s mechanics.

But there are other aspects of the game that indicate that instead of opening up, the game seems to close down the potential for semiotic and hermeneutic uncertainty which goes beyond the program and connects to the medium. Social networking is closely linked to notions of identity, as several authors have highlighted (Boyd 2007, Mendelson and Papcharissi 2010 etc.). Hogan (2010) suggests that there are two elements to this: on the one hand we can interact with other actors in real time when using social media (e.g. chatting, instant messaging etc.). In this case, we are actors performing an identity. But largely, our identity is formed by us curating elements of our lives as our identity: we post status updates, pictures etc. In this case we form our identity via artefacts. This, then, can work as a starting point for social interaction. In addition, and contrary to earlier belief (Turkle 1997, Jenkins 2008), social media harness offline networks and transfer them to online ones. In other words, the offline network is the primary network, not the other way around. The key function of social media for these networks is what Ellison et al. (2007) describe as “bridging social capital” which means it is a light-touch social capital, rather than a deeper, meaningful one (which they, however, found also features on Facebook). It is the same as keeping in touch with people or catching up quickly. One of the descriptions used “keeping tabs on acquaintances” is perhaps clearest in regards to the depth of social engagement.

How does the above connect to CSI: Crime City? First of all, Facebook allows us to express our identity as fans, if we so wish. By liking, uploading a picture or posting a video or even just commenting on a program, we curate an element of our identity that can spark further engagement with others, including comments and potentially chats. Crucially, this is with people that we already know and bridges the gap of displacement or temporal absence. Thus, we can use television—as in real life—as a means to communicate and connect with people we know and build relationships whilst expressing both our affective and semiotic experiences of a program. But this does not happen in this case: as my own attempts for feedback indicated, the automatic Facebook updates that are created are usually ignored by other members of the audience because they bear the recognisable mark of marketing and advertising. As a result, rather than bridging any gaps, playing Crime City actually seems to isolate us from our social networks.

The critical responses to the game then (largely taken from the Talk CSI forum) indicate a sense of frustration with the game. Several respondents indicated that “clicking squares isn’t very exciting,” and that by having to wait to recharge the energy, they felt that they lost the understanding of the crime narrative. As one poster put it succinctly: “My main problem with the game is that I spend so much time doing other things waiting for energy to regen that by the time I get through the case I’ve forgotten what the thing was about in the first place.” This suggests that the crime narrative, which is normally central to the enjoyment of this player, gets lost as a result of the particular format of the game. This is in line with other Facebook games which similarly limit narrative to such things as world building “rather than any kind of linear or branched storyline” (Evans 2015, 567). Instead the process of searching and processing is perceived as “boring” and “repetitive” (Daniels 2012). The players do like the similarities and “cuteness” of the characters to the actors who play them, indicating that the extension of character into the game is perceived as a real pay off. But mostly the game receives praise when it is compared to other Facebook treasure hunt games which are perceived as even more boring and repetitive. The discussion on the Talk CSI forum also makes evident that there are real attempts by the community to undercut the game in terms of helping each other by sharing Facebook details so the other players can be added as friends and work equipment and coffees (and thus energy) can be shared. That such undercutting is necessary is to do with the specific economics behind games such as CSI: Crime City: as Evans (2015) highlights, these kind of games exploit gamer impatience by reducing the amount of energy available, forcing players to either wait or spend money to get energy boosts. The undercutting of such monetization by the fans indicates attempts to subvert the power of the media companies, but does not help to create a greater semiotic uncertainty for the game.

Conclusions: CSI: Crime City and the Populist

Crime City, then, can be understood as a case of failed populism, though not all extensions of CSI need to be classed as such. Rather, the Facebook game fails, because it reduces the equivalence chain (“more CSI” means more of all the different cultural demands listed above) to a too simplistic form (“more forensic methodology with a bit of visuals and familiar faces thrown in”). If CSI was popular because it allows for a number of experiences and pleasures, then Crime City picks up on this popularity, but redefines it for the specific needs of the organizations that control the franchise. Within the populist imagination of crime, the methodology of investigation is foregrounded to the detriment of other pleasures. But this also suggests that because these organizations have specific needs (usually to make money), they need to exploit popular interest by channelling it in a particular way. This means, extensions such as the Facebook game which operates also within the limitations of the specific economics of Facebook games (Evans 2015) are not driven by opening up semiotic uncertainties and hence facilitate talk, which causes significant problems to the populist project. This means that although the opportunity for the threeway flow of communication exists—where producers communicate with audiences via the extension, and audiences communicate with each other about the extension and feed their talk back to producers—it cannot be taken up because such a model of communication would require a greater emphasis on narrative in particular and other aspects of the series, which in the case of the Facebook game cannot be offered because of the limitations of games within the social media website. Such a threeway flow of communication would involve (first) the creation of a semiotically and hermeneutically open artefact which could then (second) be curated by a user of Facebook (such as a status update about an element of the investigation plot rather than a status update about the successfulness of the investigation process). This would require a status update about what is happening (which would open up the semiotic world), rather than about the promotion of the avatar (which creates a measurable, quantifiable artefact). The semiotically open artefact could then invite comment and feedback which could flow back (third) into the game experience (as a hermeneutic horizon).

But there is something much more fundamental going on here, that needs to be addressed and that the emphasis on brand extensions alone cannot actually unravel. For this we have to return to Laclau’s concept of the populist. If the group is only constituted in the process of creating an equivalence chain out of a series of different cultural demands, then the brand extensions (which as discussed above are central to the articulation of the empty signifier “more CSI”) also create a specific kind of group: those invested enough to engage with such extensions, in other words, fans. Rather than identifying audiences as viewers or consumers of a programme, audiences, then, are addressed as a group who want more and who are emotionally invested, as well as increasingly becoming experts (Hills 2002). There are three implications to this: first, it mainstreams fandom. As Hills (2006) highlights the difference between consumers of commercial content and “authentic” fans is in part constructed. Nevertheless, as his case of fans of Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003) makes evident, there is a significant struggle involved by “authentic” fans to rescue their object of interest from the commercial machine. Hills, however, still operates with an opposition between fans and normal consumers. My point, however, is that the industry increasingly tries to break down that boundary and address us all as fans. This, as the discussion here makes evident, is an outcome of the new economic model (Lury 2004, Johnson 2007, 2012). Second, it highlights the mutual interdependence between the media institutions and the audience they address as fans: media institutions need to be able to draw on an equivalence chain to articulate the populist. While the power lies with the media institutions who are able to articulate the empty signifier, they would nevertheless be powerless without being able to draw on the heterogeneous cultural demands arising from “the fans.” And third, it highlights that the terms of engagement have changed. If we are addressed as fans, then we are much more emotionally invested in a programme than if we are viewers. Laclau indicates this by emphasizing the role of affect in the process of populist reason (2005, 115). This has, of course, been much discussed before: the role of the creation of “buzz” (Fernando 2004). Of course this “buzz” is not simply constructed through the marketing, but harnesses some real and existing cultural needs of the audience. But what the focus on Laclau allows us to see is that such a buzz can only remain successful as long as it draws and combines the heterogeneous demands and that it will ultimately fail if it becomes too one dimensional—as the case of the Facebook game indicates. Most of all, however, Laclau’s concept of the populist allows us to emphasize the complex process of negotiation that exists between media organizations and viewers in which brand extensions both create a unified group and hence define the media organization’s dependence on the group, as well as creating a hegemony that rarely manages to honour the disparate needs and demands from which the brand extensions arose in the first place.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

PETR ANTÉNE teaches Anglophone literatures and cultural studies at the Faculty of Education at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. He is the author of Campus Novel Variations: A Comparative Study of an Anglo-American Genre (2015) and editor of “Route CZ-AT” to the USA: Perceiving American Culture in Central Europe (2018). His current research focuses on contemporary British Jewish fiction.

ZOLTÁN DRAGON is Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. His fields of research include digital culture and theories, film theory and film adaptation, visual culture and photography. He is the author of The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó (2006), Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (co-authored with Réka M. Cristian, 2008), Tennessee Williams Hollywoodba megy, avagy a dráma és film dialógusa (2011). He is founding editor of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary and the publishing label AMERICANA eBooks, and head of the Digital Culture & Theories Research Group at his home university.

MARKÉTA GREGOROVÁ, affiliated with Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, researches in the field of Scottish literature, particularly twentieth-century fiction. Besides journal articles and post-conference publications, she has co-authored two monographs on the subject: the Czech-language Skotská próza v letech 1900–1980 (2011) and the English-language Scottish Gothic Fiction (2012).

SÁNDOR KLAPCSIK is an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Liberec, where he conducts research on acculturation and stereotypes in migrant cinema. He earned his PhD at the Cultural Studies Department of the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, in 2010. He was a Fulbright-Zoltai Fellow at the University of Minnesota and did a long-term research at the University of Lodz and the University of Liverpool. He published in the academic journals Zeitschrift für Balkanologie, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Extrapolation, Foundation, and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. His book Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach was published in 2012.

MICHAELA MARKOVÁ has a PhD from the School of English, Trinity College in Dublin. Her research focuses primarily on contemporary Northern Irish fiction and children's literature. She is the editor of Questions of Identity (2018), and co-editor of Politics of Irish Writing: A Collection of Essays (2010), Boundary Crossings (2012) and Tradition and Modernity (2014). Since 2006, she has taught for Irish Studies Workshop, an intensive academic course on Irish literature and culture organised by Charles University Prague and Palacký University Olomouc and supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland. She currently works as the Assistant professor at Technical University Liberec.

DÁVID LEVENTE PALATINUS is Senior Assistant Professor in Digital Media and Cultural Studies and founder of the Anthropocene Media Lab at the University of Ruzomberok. He has worked and written on violence in serial culture, medicine and autopsy, and human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. He is co-editor of the ECREA section of CSTOnline, and Rewind: British and American Studies Series, Aras Edizioni, Italy. He is co-editor (with Serena Baiesi and Murizio Ascari) of Gothic Metamorphoses across the Centuries: Contexts, Legacies, Media (forthcoming, 2019). His monograph Spectres of Medicine: The Ethos of Contemporary Medical Dramas is forthcoming this year.

ZÉNÓ VERNYIK graduated from the University of Szeged and Masaryk University and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He is Senior Assistant Professor in the English Department of the Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic. His primary research interests are the oeuvre of British writers of Hungarian origin (primarily Arthur Koestler and George Mikes), modern and contemporary American and British literature, spatial theory, and the representation of cities in literature. His books include Cities of Saviors: Urban Space in E. E. Cummings' Complete Poems, 1904-1962 and Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (2015) and Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings' Art Across Borders (with J. Flajšar, 2007). He has also published articles on Australian cinema and Belgian literature.

MARTINA VRÁNOVÁ was a recipient of the Hlavinka Fellowship from the Czech Educational Foundation of Texas at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA, where she earned her M. A. degree in English. In 2010 she received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology. Her research interests include contemporary British and American fiction, rhetoric, and academic writing. She has published her own approach to intertextuality in fiction in “Hypertext, Hypotext, Grafted Text: A Practical Approach to Print Hypertextuality in the Process of Literary Analysis“ (2012) and a steam-punk novel Psohlavec (2018).

ELKE WEISSMANN is a Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill University, UK. Her research interests focus on television, in particular aspects of transnational and convergent television, and feminism. Her books include Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influences between the US and the UK (2012) and Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives, Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies (2013, with Helen Thornham). She is a member of the editorial team of Critical Studies in Television.

Megjegyzések

[←1]

This figure is Maev Kennedy’s approximation since an official comprehensive publishing statistics concerning Troubles fiction covering the period from the beginning of the conflict until today has yet to be issued.

[←2]

The other genres claimed to have embodied what has been termed the “received” form of Troubles narrative are the national romance, often labeled as love-across-the barricades, and domestic fiction (Cleary 1996, 227–76).

[←3]

On the discussion of the said impasse, see, for example, Brannigan, John, 2005. “Northern Irish Fiction: Provisionals and Pataphysicians” in A Concise Companion to British Fiction by John English. ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 141–163.

[←4]

With respect to the given space and the sources upon which it is based, the overview that follows should be perceived as an illustrative one. It lists the major thriller types published in the early stages of the Troubles in which the limited/limiting portrayal of the conflict appeared.

[←5]

Magee claims there have been “at least sixty-six authors with journalism or media backgrounds” who have written a Troubles novel (2001, 8).

[←6]

Contrary to such accusations stated above, many journalists had had access to local communities and their fictional works do question the region’s everyday life matters comprehensively, even if what they depict might seem equally unflattering.

[←7]

Examples of novels by SAS veterans are Shaun Clarke’s Soldier E – SAS: Sniper Fire in Belfast (1993), Andy McNab’s Immediate Action (1996), and Chris Ryan’s Stand By, Stand By (1996).

[←8]

Morrison draws parallels between this perspective and the one put forward in the Punch magazine in the nineteenth century and claims that such “caricatures” have actually “become the seedbed of racist attitudes for subsequent generations” (2001, v).

[←9]

Further references to the novel will hereafter be stated parenthetically in the text.

[←10]

This strategy is in fact so dominant that it structures the novel: parts of and/or the whole chapters that depict these individual protagonists being in or reflecting on similar situations alternate to provide marked contrast.

[←11]

Tod is killed in a gunfight and Róisín ends up a widow with two children to raise on her own—one from her previous failed marriage.

[←12]

While Morrison maintains that authors without experience of active involvement in the conflict might be successful literary authors, he argues that only those with such experience can be serious. In other words, they can provide truthful portrayal of the situation (2001, vi).

[←13]

The author has continuously and, more importantly, enthusiastically supported Irish (republican) concerns. He has served as a national director of publicity for Sinn Féin, a role that echoes the representational aim of the novel.

[←14]

This retrospectively justifies the potency of Raymond’s political conviction which the text elevates onto the level of a socially approved vocation.

[←15]

Further references to the novel will be to the 2010 Vintage edition and stated hereafter parenthetically in the text.

[←16]

The text does not explicitly mention of which particular organization Fegan used to be a member, however, given his birthplace, communitarian affiliations and textual references to the organization’s ethos and activities, we can assume that he partook in the IRA.

[←17]

The novel contains crime, noir and horror elements, which has resulted in it being branded under different genre headings.

[←18]

Schwab’s influential study on violent histories and transgenerational trauma informs theoretical perspective on this issue the article proceeds from; it also inspired the title of this sub-section.

[←19]

The haunting quality of the text is quite explicitly alluded to by the title of its American edition, The Ghosts of Belfast (New York: Soho Press, 2009).

[←20]

This is a textual reference to the Disappeared, victims of abduction, murder and secret burial carried out principally by republicans during the Troubles. Many questions concerning this issue, such as the location of the yet undiscovered bodies, remain unanswered, which constitutes this subject one of the impediments to the closure of the aforementioned painful chapter of Northern Irish history.

[←21]

The portrayed protagonists are fictional, however, they bear resemblances to real life political representatives such as Gerry Adams who, despite being recurrently questioned about his role in the conflict, “has yet to admit to ever belonging to the IRA” and to answer for his past actions (Lodge 2013, n. p.).

[←22]

The cover of the 2011 Vintage edition presents Fegan as a protector of the weak despite the fact that he is, in fact, a ruthless killer.

[←23]

Despite the fact that the protagonist has had a severe drinking problem which has affected his physical condition, he succeeds in his killing spree against all odds.

[←24]

This assumption is confirmed in the sequel to this novel, Collusion (2010), in which Fegan is lured to return to Belfast to deal with the consequences of his acts he committed in The Twelve.

[←25]

See for example: Robert Duggan (2007) “Iain M. Banks, Postmodernism and the Gulf War”; Alan Riach (2005) Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation; Berthold Schoene-Harwood (1999) “Dams Burst: Devolving Gender in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory”;  Kirsty A. MacDonald (2011) “‘This Desolate and Appalling Landscape’: The Journey North in Contemporary Scottish Gothic”; Timothy C. Baker (2014) Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition.

[←26]

Hisako seems to take justice in her own hands just like Andy in Complicity does, yet in her heroic effort she is definitely portrayed positively, in contrast to Andy. The difference between Andy and Hisako is that she kills in order to save her own life, she does not have any other choice while Andy is in no imminent danger of life. What is more, Hisako is a murderer and very well-aware of it. Some years ago, out of a feeling of total frustration with herself and in a fit of rage, she killed a policeman in a demonstration. Having morals, however, she suffers a severe nervous breakdown, which is another distinction between Hisako and Andy.

[←27]

These works become relatively similar, however, to alternate history, a subgenre of SF and postmodern fiction, which focuses on multiple timelines and thus contradicts the idea of teleological history (Duncan 2003, 214).

[←28]

For some writers it is not a problem, of course, to merge characters from various ages, especially since some of these monsters are immortal and can live an eternal life. Thus, Frankenstein’s monster can turn up in the company of Dracula, as it happens, for example, in the recent British-American horror television series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016). Holmes can also be transferred to any age and place, for example, that of the US in the Second World War and contemporary London or New York.

[←29]

Hills’s analysis of Newman’s counterfictions stresses that the works “take a claim to social/cultural progress, announcing that what was previously excluded (homosexuality) can now be reclaimed and voiced, or that what was the norm may become monstrous (imperial or commercial power)” (2003, 451).

[←30]

Sindbad, one of the principal characters in the European versions of One Thousand and One Nights, has entered the canon of Hungarian literature after Gyula Krúdy started to write melancholical and nostalgic short stories which are set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, featuring a womanizing protagonist with such a name.

[←31]

Mash-ups are works that are primarily based on mainstream fiction, but add elements from popular fiction, especially vampire and zombie themes.

[←32]

The word is a homonym both in Doyle’s and Gaiman’s text. In Doyle’s novel, the term is first interpreted as an unfinished word (Rachel), then as the German word “vengeance,” but finally turns out to be a red herring, a “blind,” a false clue that disguises a private vengeance as a political murder. In Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” the German word becomes a genuine clue, as the story describes a political murder. Gaiman’s detective also finds an additional meaning for the word, as it is, he says, “an old term for a hunting dog” (2007, 50).

[←33]

With this the story once again follows The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where the fight between Moriarty and Holmes is described, but this time it is the Professor who disappears, and later returns, following their duel near the Reichenbach Falls.

[←34]

My essay has not dealt with the non-fantastic adaptations and rewritings of Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, a similar trend is observable in some of those works as well when they weave various fictional and historical characters into the storyline. For example, Anthony Burgess’s “Murder to Music” hypothesizes that the young Sherlock was taught Greek by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the story also brings the composer Arthur Sullivan into the case. In Chris Robinson’s “Merridew of Abominable Memory,” the old Dr. Watson is psychoanalyzed by a physiatrist who studied under Sigmund Freud, while Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution (1974) rewrites the figure of the detective as a patient of Freud. Tony Pi’s “Dynamics of a Hanging” envisions cooperation between Dr Watson and Lewis Carroll to decode Moriarty’s secret messages; his story, in a way similar to The Seven Per Cent Solution and Vonda N. McIntyre’s “The Adventure of the Field Theorems,” also places Doyle into the storyline.

[←35]

I agree with Bart Simon who suggests that “a ‘post-panoptic’ condition does not necessarily imply that we must be ‘anti-’ or ‘post-’ Foucauldian” (Simon 2005, 2).

[←36]

Admittedly, there is a marked difference between an amateur detective and a private eye, both in terms of their motivation and in terms of their professionalism. What brings them together both for Harpham (2014) and for me is their marked opposition to the police detective in terms of their existence outside the official, state-sanctioned methods of finding the culprit, leading to the position of the outsider.

[←37]

The implications of that are of course that such a model allows us to work against the neoliberal conviction that a commercial system in which audiences show what they want by how they behave is best. Thus, giving them more of what they are already watching seems a logical step. Instead, it recognizes that audiences’ needs are constantly changing and are diverse and differentiated. This means cultural output, in order to cover those needs must be diverse and differentiated. Such an understanding takes us closer to the approach the Annan Committee (1977) took in their recommendations for the development of broadcasting.

[←38]

Such language of “care” is often adopted by institutions within the television industry that produce material, particularly when the programme is threatened by cancellation by its broadcaster. This was for example noticeable when the news came in that the BBC had decided to cancel Ripper Street (BBC 2012–2013 and Amazon from 2014). Thus, Jerome Flynn who plays Sergeant Drake emphasized the “shock” that the actors were feeling, and the “wonderful job” that the series was (Moss 2013). In this context, we see again how Laclau’s model allows us to make sense of the competing institutional forces within the television industries—also internationally—which enables television institutions to align themselves with audiences.

[←39]

I draw in particular on the methodologies discussed by Philip S. Howard (2002) who indicates the difference between traditional online ethnography and an examination of online reviews of audiences where there is no community into which the “ethnographer” has to negotiate entry. Indeed, I largely follow the example of Ann Steiner (2008) who examined the customer reviews on online retailer Amazon, which I will do for the TV series, as it allows me to compare British, American and German reviews with each other, to emphasize potential cultural differences. For the Facebook game, I need to draw on a number of different internet sites and rely more heavily on semiprofessional reviews to collect my evidence.

[←40]

And there seems to be a trend back to the emphasis on social interaction, not just by sitting around the television together and watching together (which, in the UK, at least, experienced somewhat of a renaissance; see BARB 2013), but also via the second screen which is used to interact with other audience members who are spatially absent but who nevertheless share and interact about the same viewing experience.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Crime and Detection in Contemporary Culture | Martina Vránová, Zénó Vernyik and Dávid Levente Palatinus

PART I. CRIME AND DETECTION IN LITERATURE

“But Here, in Edinburgh! It’s Unthinkable.” Bringing the Evil to the Doorstep in Ian Rankin’s Knots & Crosses | Markéta Gregorová

Accurate or Else?: Representations of the Northern Irish Conflict in the Troubles Thrillers—Danny Morrison’s The Wrong Man and Stuart Neville’s The Twelve | Michaela Marková

The Vision of Proliferating Crime in Iain Banks’s Fiction | Martina Vránová

Detection in the Anglo‑American Campus Novel: A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus | Petr Anténe

Shadows of the Fantastic over Baker Street: Counterfictionality in Recent Rewritings of the Sherlock Holmes Saga | Sándor Klapcsik

PART II. CRIME AND DETECTIONBEYOND LITERATURE

Displaced Detection: Surveillance and Algorithmic Logic as a New Model of the Crime Calculus | Zoltán Dragon

Mediating the Corpse: CSI and the Affective Screen | Dávid Levente Palatinus

“Through a Glass, Darkly”: The (Im)possibility of Detection in The Black Mirror | Zénó Vernyik

Popular Crime and Populist Investigation: The CSI Franchise and Multi‑Media Participation | Elke Weissmann

List of Contributors