Madness and the Colonies: French and Anglo-Saxon Versions of the Mysterious Origins of Crime

Madness and the Colonies: French and Anglo-Saxon Versions of the Mysterious Origins of Crime Uri Eisenzweig i. T h a t a u th e n tic d e te c tiv e s to rie s a r e te x t u a ll y IMPOSSIBLE should be quite obvious. Indeed, hinging on the assumption that a real mystery can be solved in a purely analytical way by the very narrative that creates it in the first place, the definition of classical detective fiction is self-contradictory. On the one hand, if some events referred to by a story are to be shrouded in mystery, various details relating to these events must be missing from the text; yet, on the other hand, if an acceptable solution is to be found through the sole power of reasoning (the “deductive power” of the detective), these very details have to appear in the text all the same, without any further nar­ rative development having to occur for that purpose. In other words, for pure detection to be possible in a real story, the most significant narrative elements (the “clues”) would have to be both absent from and present in the text.1There is a structural incompatibility between a hypothetically logical unraveling of a mystery and the coherence of the fictional nar­ rative that claims to lead to such an unraveling; between analytic logic and narrative linearity. If there is to be a mystery, it cannot be solved; if it is solved, it never really existed. And if it is solved, while it really existed, then no narrative could have been involved at all.2 This logical impossibility of authentic detective fiction has many interesting implications with regard to both the very emergence of such a mythical concept (where and when, that is, why was it conceived?), and its continuous mode of existence (the reality of the individual detective 1. Or, to use narratological terminology: they would have to be at the same time present in the “story” (histoire), and absent from the “discourse” (récit). Putting it this way is useful when approaching the detective genre from the reader’s point of view, which I shall not do in this article. 2. In which case, the text in question would simply belong to a non-narrative genre, such as the riddle. Vol.XXVI, No. 2 3 L ’E sprit C réateur story being in a way displaced to the social discourse that surrounds and defines it). The following remarks are intended to touch upon one of the most significant among these implications, by examining the effect of the structural contradiction of the genre on the narrative figure that repre­ sents both Truth and Evil: the criminal. The point being that the very idea of a textually coherent detective story entails a very peculiar deter­ mination of the criminal’s identity. Or if you will, that whenever texts claiming (or claimed) to belong to the classical detective genre have—and indeed, some have—come closer than usual to achieving such an impos­ sible coherence, the unmasked criminal has tended to be a character of a special type. A type that, interestingly, seems to find two different, yet complementary thematic expressions in the early French and AngloSaxon traditions. II. The author of the mysterious crime is at the very core of the opposi­ tion between the narrative form of a mystery and the textual coherence of its solution. Indeed, as the ultimate key to the mystery, it is above all the criminal’s identity that must be absent, as such, from the story of the investigation, while at the same time, it is bound to appear at its ending, since no conclusion is conceivable in traditional detective stories without precisely the culprit’s identity being clearly and irrefutably established. In other words, it is first and foremost around the criminal’s narrative figure that the question crystallizes as to how something radically absent (i.e., the authenticity of the mystery) can transform itself into an unques­ tionable presence (a totally satisfactory solution)—without the initial data being modified through the interference of one or more subsequent physical events (say, the discovery...