The Social Anxieties of Crime and Detective Fiction

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, fiction is thematic. This is particularly true when dealing with detective and crime fiction because it deals with physical, emotional, and social anxieties. We'd rather see the world, our homes, and our lives as safe, and place the dangers of the modern world at a distance. News does this for us: all the bad things happen somewhere else and to someone else. Detective and crime fiction is a safe way to invite these ideas into our homes and see a safe resolution.

The expectation in crime and detective fiction is simple: something has gone wrong and must be set right. Whether it be theft, violence, scandal, blackmail, or murder, the truth is sought, the wrong party brought to justice and amends made to the victims to return the world to a pre-crisis balance. Each possible crime represents more than itself: murder is a threat to the sanctity of life, theft to property, blackmail to privacy. When we see these crimes in fiction it’s an opportunity to explore the significance of these social ills. Even if it is just a little bit, we get to feel anxious about our own life, property, privacy, etc. Thankfully, the detective represents the social order, through their efforts to discover the evil and set it right.

Take the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” This story focuses on a young woman, Helen Stoner, who fears her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Sir Grimsby Roylott, because her sister died shortly before the sister’s marriage. Roylott is a violent man who keeps a menagerie of exotic animals, and keeps his stepdaughter's bed mounted in a room, so it cannot be moved. Holmes and Watson hide in Helen's room and discover a poisonous snake let into her room. They beat it back, and the snake attacks and kills Roylott himself, giving the story some poetic justice.

Roylott represents a threat to Victorian standards with his violent temper and exotic menagerie: hardly a respectable British gentleman. His step-daughter, not of his historically hot-tempered aristocracy, represents Victorian ideals of womanhood: she is innocent and needs protection, which appears in the form of Holmes. The violent, exotic Roylott not only poses a threat to his daughter but to Victorian decorum, womanhood, and fatherhood, in the name of claiming her inheritance. Holmes comes and fulfills the role of paternal protector, performing the social roles Roylott has abandoned. So this is not simply a crime story about violent men, damsels in distress, and exotic animals, but it's a story about foreign threats and influences, and familial duty, with Holmes to fill the gaps.

The villain represents threats to the social order while the victims represent what is good and wholesome and the detective returns the world to a positive situation.

This means when looking at crime and detective fiction, it is important to consider what the crime and villain represent thematically. To explore this idea, I'm going to take a few blog posts looking at how the classic, archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes deals with some of the major crimes and villains he faces, and, perhaps a few other pieces of crime fiction.

To begin, I will look at the three most famous of Holmes villains: Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and Charles Augustus Milverton. Adler is famous because she is the woman who beat him, Moriarty because he is “the Napoleon of crime” Holmes' arch-nemesis, and Milverton with the use of information for personal gain.

Framing Frankentsein Part 3: Developing and Questioning Reliability

Near the end of Frankenstein, Victor admonishes Walton to beware the monster's eloquence. However, in the following pages, Walton describes how Victor's own eloquence buoyed the men of his ship. This creates an inconsistency: if the Monster is not to be trusted because of his eloquence, why should Victor be trusted for possessing the same talent? And from there, if Victor is eloquent and persuasive, can we really believe his fantastic tale? (For what it's worth, while Victor cheered them, he could not convince them to continue on their dangerous voyage.)

This highlights one of the great issues with a frame narrative, especially Frankenstein: reliability. Reliability is a surprisingly complex issue, one literature scholars continually address and reevaluate. It forces us to stop and think about how and why we trust or distrust, narrators, characters and their stories; and because Frankenstein is focalized through Walton, it is necessary to consider his reliability first.

Walton's narration begins with the letters to his sister. Letters are a unique form of writing: they are personal and intimate, which makes it different from novel writing meant to be public. By using letters to initiate the story, Shelley makes it seem more reliable, more realistic because while a narrator may be unreliable, we expect a brother writing to his sister to be honest and sincere. These opening letters establish Walton's reliability so we will trust him when he takes Victor Frankenstein at his word. This is compounded, at the end of the novel, after Victor has completed his narrative, the monster appears to Walton, removing the Monster from Victor's narrative, and putting him in Walton's.

Why have the monster appear? Because we trust Walton more than we do Frankenstein. Reliable narrators need to do more than accurately tell what happened, but also be able to accurately interpret and understand it. This means Walton is necessary to make the narrative reliable because Victor is harder to trust. Victor, in the course of his narrative, is incapacitated several times and experiences deliriums. He is also unsteady: he switches from one perspective to another, eagerly creating the monster, then shunning it and fearing it, and most importantly, misinterpreting what is around him.

The most prominent example of Victor's failure to interpret is when the monster declares he will be with Victor on his wedding night. Victor takes this as a sign that the monster will try to kill him on his wedding night. However, this is not the monster's goal, and there is actually little evidence to suggest it: the monster elsewhere suggests he wants to make Victor miserable as he has made the monster himself miserable, and has already done this by killing and framing for murder friends of the Frankenstein family and the monster's threats come after Victor has destroyed the woman companion the monster commissioned him to make. The evidence is there: a miserable life, murdered friends and family, the abandoned monster-bride, and yet Victor insists the monster targets him despite all evidence to the contrary.

Between Victor's deliriums, his changing perspective, and his inability to interpret, he becomes an unreliable narrator. However, it is only his ability to interpret we can readily call into question. Walton, conveniently stranded in the arctic, has no means to confirm any of Victor Frankenstein's story, and because Walton believes Victor, and we are intended to believe Walton, we therefore believe Victor. The monster doesn't appear to confirm Walton's narration, but to confirm Victor's and his own narration. His few statements align with Victor's narration, which the monster was absent from, so had Victor contorted the story, the monster could not have known.

Ironically, then, all of the reliability hinges on Walton: is this the fantastic story of a man who was in the right place at the right time, or could he be fabricating this story? It's hard to tell: we have Victor and the monster to confirm one another's stories, but Walton has to rely on narrative devices and techniques: the letters, his station as captain, his dire situation, to affect his own reliability.

But this leads to a perhaps unanswerable question: is Walton's frame a narrative device to make himself reliable, or was he really in the right place at the right time?

Framing Frankenstein Part 2: Frames and Focalization

Focalization is, in its simplest sense, a matter of whose perspective the information is coming from. As a concept it was introduced by French literary critic Gerard Genette, in his book Narrative Discourse, as a replacement for saying first, second, or third person narrator. It is a useful term because it suggests that narrators can be read and understood beyond their use of pronouns.

I bring this up in this discussion of Frankenstein and frame narration because focalization helps us to stop and really think about where the information is coming from, not just who is saying it or their relationship to the events being described: each framed narrative cannot be properly read without considering its relationship to its frame, or, how each level is focalized.

Take, for example, fellow horror fiction Dracula. Dracula is an epistolary novel: collections of letters, diary, and journal entries recreated (presumably) faithfully. Within the context of Dracula these narratives were gathered from many sources and lined up in a logical form. In doing so, each piece is put on the same level, in tandem with one another: it's not a matter of how Jonathan Harker met Van Helsing who told Harker about his pupil, Dr. Seward, who told about his experiences with his zoophagous patient Renfield, but how each character relates their own personal experiences. The epistolary nature of such a story even adds to its immediacy: each character presents relevant information as, or shortly after, it was being experienced. Mina Harker and Dr. Seward do not amend their diaries to reflect what they would learn later. This keeps the information up to date and each voice presented in the narrative is unmediated by any others. When Jonathan Harker speaks, it is focalized through Harker and no one else. 

It would be a grave mistake to call Frankenstein’s layered narration “Unmediated”.

It may be easy to see both as a collection of related stories, but it is not that simple. Where Dracula features different narrators taking turns to tell their own narratives, Frankenstein is about Captain Walton telling the story of Victor Frankenstein, which includes his own narrative about how the monster told his own narrative, which even includes telling the story of the French family, which itself includes the Turkish merchant's story. Dracula is many snippets cobbled together to tell one story. Frankenstein is one story telling other stories.

And just as there are framed narratives, there are also framed narrators. Victor and the monster both assume the role of narrator at their respective moments, with the novel funneling down into and up out of its narrative construction. It's just all the information has come through different narrators, who we trust to relate everything the others have said. And Walton's letters, his doubt his sister will even receive them, mixed with Frankenstein's deathbed confession, serves to frame the story to remove doubt: to make this fantastic tale seem realistic and plausible. But this raises a serious issue with narrative reliability, and we must ask ourselves, to what extent can Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster be trusted? After all, Walton could have altered either Victor or the monster's narrative, and Victor could have altered the monster's. Layers of narration create the facade of reliability, but do more to complicate it. More on that next time.

Framing Frankenstein Part 1: Understanding Frame Narration

I was in college the first time I read Mary Shelley's horror story, Frankenstein. Admittedly, the only image I had of the monster was Boris Karloff’s from Universal Studio's horror hay-day, so I was surprised when the monster turned out swift, nimble, and eloquent. It was an enjoying read, but the horror elements weren't what would stick with me. Instead, it was how the work strove to appear reliable and believable. I realized this a few months later while tutoring at a high school, a student came in with a copy of Frankenstein. I picked it up with excitement (a healthy balance to her sighs) and started discussing frame narration.

Frame Narration is an interesting narrative choice because it embeds one narrative within another, it isn’t so much like a picture in a frame, but more like a painting of a painter painting a painting. We see not just the one painting, but all of them, and take all of them into consideration. So, back to narratives we have to understand each narrative within the context of the situation it’s being told, and each frame impacts the way we read the storied being framed and the frames themselves, making it possible to give a piece several different readings based on how these narratives are read and compared. Frame narratives require a different kind of reading because it forces you to think about what the two narratives have to do with one another, in terms of themes, symbols, and even the contexts in which the narratives are themselves framed.

Frame narration is kind of like gossip: one person gained information they want to pass on, but part of passing on that information is describing where that information came from. For example, you found out that a friend just got a new job and you want to tell someone else about it (or even explaining to the person who got the job how you know about it), but rather than just say “Rick got a new job teaching Driver's ed,” You say, “I was having lunch with Laura when a driver's ed car drove by and she wondered if Rick was the instructor. I said 'Rick doesn't teach Driver's ed, and Laura said, 'He does now. He just interviewed for the position. He's going to quit his night job.''”

In the first example, there is a single narrative, with Rick as the protagonist and the focus being his new job. The second involves telling a narrative about having lunch and an event triggering the other narrative. This is a simple formulation, but it's still framing the narratives.

Shelley's Frankenstein goes considerably deeper than this.

It opens with the sailor writing letters to his sister: we get a glimpse of who he is, his motivations and interests, and then, one day, a man is discovered on the ice: Victor Frankenstein. Once Frankenstein is well, he begins to impart his tale to Captain Walton, who is in turn, transcribing it. It is a tale of modern and arcane science and how his studies and a death in his family led him to try reanimating dead tissue. From these experiments, the monster is born and turned loose on the world, who then has his chance to tell his story to Victor Frankenstein, halfway through the book, which includes the tale of the disenfranchised French aristocratic family, all of which is then embedded within Victor Frankenstein's narrative. Once the monster's narration concludes, Frankenstein himself returns to his tale of science and tragedy, before the sailor becomes the primary narrator again, and because he began the narrative, he is able to end it.

This creates an interesting set of questions: Why have the sailor? Why even use these deep levels of first person narration? There are “found manuscript” narratives like The Scarlet Letter, Robinson Crusoe, or Don Quixote, and other frame narratives where the top narrative is the most important, like One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, but Frankenstein doesn't work like these, but this framing device does influence the narrative in primarily two ways: first, it actually establishes a sense of reliability, and second, it develops significant themes, but in order to understand how it does these things, it helps to know just what is going on in a frame narrative.

Thoughts on Theory

Once, a friend asked me about literary theory. He explained he’d taken a literary theory class and he still wasn't sure what theory was or why it was called “theory.” He explained his confusion stemmed from the fact the class used a single text, The Great Gatsby, and applied every theoretical approach they discussed to it. He approached the class with a scientific perspective, expecting it to be a matter of testing theories and hypotheses on a literary text, and that proving one would invalidate the others.

Well, literary theory doesn't work like that. I explained that literary theory is more about the approach a reader takes when studying a text.

A reader can take, for example, a feminist approach to one text, and they will focus on the portrayal of gender and gender relationships. Another reader may take a structuralist approach to the same text and they will walk away with a reading that focuses on how the story is set up. And someone doing a Reader-Response reading will focus on how the text impacts the reader.

A literary theory isn't so much a hypothetical statement as it is a school of thought that addresses issues that emerge in literature and how those issues are read and understood; and literary theorists are constantly responding to, complicating, criticizing, validating, and even disproving (or attempting to) the work of other literary theorists. So what is the point? The goal of all of this is to learn how literature tells us something more than just, well, what the literature itself is: about how we live our lives, engage in culture and society, and with each other, etc.

Allow me to share a classic example of a prevalent issue in literary theory: authorial intention.

Authorial intention basically asks two questions: First, whether or not it is possible to know what the author intended by what they wrote. Answering this question generally deals with what is known about the author, their life, their goals, their personal philosophies, and how that biographical and historical information intersects with the text so we as readers can find the author's purpose in their writing.

Seems simple enough, right? Then there's the second question: whether or not the author themselves were aware of what their intentions were, i.e. to what extent were they subconsciously motivated, or attributing too much intention to what could be coincidences. I've told people this before and people, generally the more hard-science minded, scoff at this idea, retorting with “How can you not know what you intended?” But it has been a serious issue in literary theory, and stems from other philosophical ideas about our own ability to self-perceive and self-conceive, to understand just what's going on in our own heads.

And there are literary theorists who argue that authorial intention is a moot point: that it isn't an issue worth addressing or it is impossible to answer, while others still try to decipher the author's intention from the texts they study. What complicates this is there isn't necessarily anything right or wrong about any of these perspectives. It isn't necessarily a matter of right or wrong, but much more a matter of how. How do you read and understand a piece of literature? How do you interpret it? What details and kinds of information do you consider appropriate?

Regardless of the approach, literary theory aims to discover how a piece of writing is more than just words on a page. Literary theorists look to literature to discover what literature says about society, culture, the human condition, philosophy, psychology, history, and even how literature comments on literature itself. Literary analysis, in any form, should go beyond what the piece of literature itself says.

Studying literature is a journey, and the theoretical approach you take is merely the path you take. Not every path will take you to the same place, but you will likely come close to and even cross a few other paths on your way there.

“Nightfall” and the Experimental Nature of Science Fiction

Take our solar system, and change one thing. Only one. In the entire expanse of the solar system, one change might not make that much of a difference.

How about the number of suns that shed light on Earth? How might that affect the flora and fauna? Or even culture, philosophy, society, and human nature?

Isaac Asimov's short story “Nightfall,” written in 1941, focuses on a group of scientists, mostly astronomers, and a newspaper reporter from a fictional world called Lagash. The world is not unlike Earth: it has science, religion, culture, art, architecture, universities, newspapers, etc. There is, however, one significant difference: it has six suns. The result of this constellation means Lagash does not have a night, or rather, they have a night once every two thousand years when a perfectly placed solar eclipse pitches the world in darkness.

This sounds like it might be some kind of survivalist story: what do you do when the sun goes down? And I would not be surprised to learn some script writer has tried to turn it into that. However, the story ends just as the last visible sun vanishes from view. The fates of the characters are not specified, though the outlook is certainly grim.

What makes Asimov's story interesting, and an important piece of science fiction, is not the survivalist “do-or-die” that would follow night, but a survey of how this kind of world would compare with Earth. As stated above, there are many similarities, but the differences Asimov postulates are what make it significant. A few examples include:

• Because of the suns, astronomers had to determine mathematically there is a moon.
• No artificial lighting. In fact, when they produce torches, in anticipation of the darkness, they say graduate students developed them.
• They hypothesize a one-sun system could exist, but also that orbiting planets could not foster life because it would be steeped in darkness half the time.

Most interestingly are the soft science-fiction elements:

• People go crazy or extremely claustrophobic when put in darkness.
• Religious explanations of previous nights.
• Using religious doctrines to validate scientific hypotheses.

I like to think of “Nightfall” as a science experiment that simply changes one thing and then logically extrapolates how that one change would affect everything else; particularly the people who are affected by that change.

“Nightfall” has no starships, no light sabers, no ray guns. There is certainly science but it's basic science; explanations, formulas, and telescopes, current technology for when the story was written, 1941. Until contact is made with a world like Lagash or our current sun is joined by five others, this isn't a situation we'll encounter any time soon. So it isn't science fiction in the sense of Star Trek or Firefly, namely, predictions as to how the distant future will be. Instead, “Nightfall” is a science fiction closer to Marvel or DC comics, asking, “What would it be like if our situation, our world, right now, was slightly different.” Authors of science fiction, therefore, take these diverse elements and, like a math or chemistry equation, play with the variables, and use their understanding of scientific principles to extrapolate how that would account for a different world.

Both types of science fiction, though, try to understand the relationship between humanity and science. We tend to think of science fiction in technological terms – those light sabers and starships I mentioned earlier – but those are simply extensions of science. After all, we call it science fiction and not technology fiction.

The emphasis, though, isn't on the science. Asmiov could have tried out the math himself to postulate the existence of such a world and hypothesized, in detail, the flora, fauna, and culture of that world, but there's something powerful you get from fiction that you don't get from scholarly work. This story, after all, deals with a question: what do you do when the sun goes down? Asimov's science fiction isn't just trying to explore complex scientific ideas and theories, but, in a softer science sort of way, to explore the relationship that humanity has with science.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 4: A Symbolic Death

As the fourth, and last, post dealing with sympathies, audience, and Anton Chekov's play The Cherry Orchard, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the end of the play, wherein an image and a sound are powerfully juxtaposed. The image is of Firs (the old valet) dying, and the sound is the cherry trees being cut down. It seems simple enough, and yet this juxtaposition carries significant symbolic weight.

Firs has been a mainstay at Ranevsky's estate, and even fondly remembers the time before the emancipation of the serfs. After all, he had it pretty good as a valet, one of the head servants, and probably saw his fellow servants go their separate ways once they were emancipated and the estate grew too poor to keep them on. He rose to the highest position he could as a servant, misses the others after they have left, and his closing words, the words that close the play, are “I'm good for nothing.“

As for the felling of cherry trees, Lopahin has made no secret of his desire to do so. He had encouraged Ranevsky to save her land by felling the orchard and building estates. He had used his business savvy to know what would be the best thing to do financially, and will now do the same, making his investment work for himself. But he does so quickly, felling the trees even before the family has left so Ranevsky watches her beloved orchard fall as she leaves her family’s estate.

Ending a narrative is a daunting task: everything has to be carefully resolved, and a Russian play with its full cast is no exception. By this time the other characters have already left and Firs is alone. So the question is, why end the play on this note, with the sound of the ax and the death of an old valet?

The characters represent more than just themselves. Just as Lopahin represents the nouveau riche and Ranevsky the noblesse oblige, Firs represents an old generation, so rooted in its ways that even when emancipation came, he did not accept it and continues to live the same life he always had. Firs, by virtue of his position, his age, and his attitude about serfdom, represents an older way of life, even though he has few lines and little attention. He brings with him a lot of social and cultural baggage and he, ironically, is willing to carry it while the audience must decide how to sympathize with him and what he represents. Even as he dies, he complains that Gaev, Ranevsky's brother, probably left in an inadequate coat. Firs, as a former serf who stayed with the family and became the valet, is a strong representation of that time and that mentality. He's like the cherry trees: an old establishment representing a bygone era. Ranevsky assumed that since they always had been there, they always would be.

So what about when the character dies? All of that dies with him. When a character represents something, like a historical period, a certain mindset or occupation or lifestyle, dies, it means that, unless there's another character that also represents it, everything they symbolize dies as well.

And if they're killed? Firs' death is interesting because it has the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down. Firs stands old and symbolic, alongside the cherry trees, and the two are only further linked symbolically through the juxtapositions of their deaths. Lopahin is responsible for the cherry orchard's removal, just as how Ranevsky is responsible for having lost her money and the estate. Lopahin does not take the ax to Firs, but by felling the orchard, Lopahin symbolically brings about the death of an era, initiating a new world governed by hard work and business rather than estates and inheritances. It's a world that has no place for the old serf Firs. And so, there's nothing left for him.

We don't just sympathize with people. We sympathize with what they represent, and how we demonstrate that sympathy shows how we sympathize with their representations. To pity Firs' death is to pity an old lifestyle. Similarly, to lionize Lopahin would be to lionize all he represents. Characters and people cannot be separated from what they do and what they represent.