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9. Under/Cover: Strategies of Detection and Evasion in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
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205 CHAPTER 9 UNDER/COVER: STRATEGIES OF DETECTION AND EVASION IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S ALIAS GRACE Marilyn Rose As Laura Marcus notes in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, “Detective fiction has played and continues to play a complex and curious role in relation to the broader field of literature.” In its doubleness—as it presents both an “absent story” concerning an unsolved crime, and a “second story,” which is the narrative of an investigation that will lay bare the facts of the first—the detective genre is remarkably versatile and open to experiment . In the tension, for example, between the absent narrative, the mystery surrounding a crime, and the investigative narrative, with its emphasis on assembling clues and solving a conundrum, the detective story exhibits a capacity for self-reflexivity or meta-literariness that draws attention to the reading process itself and its underlying epistemological desires (245). As such, the detective genre particularly invites postmodern play, the construction of narratives in which the quest for certainty that underlies the classic detective paradigm can be questioned and (most probably) found wanting. Heta Pyrhonen goes so far as to say that detective fiction “serves as a kind of laboratory for testing various critical hypotheses and methodologies” of all kinds (quoted in Marcus 245). Hence it is not surprising that the roster of contemporary writers who employ the crime fiction formula for purposes of interrogation and subversion is lengthy, and includes writers as varied as Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Josef Skvorecky, Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Paul Auster. It is within CHAPTER 9 206 this context, and this lustrous company, that Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) invites—and rewards—critical scrutiny. One of Canada’s most renowned writers, Margaret Atwood is also famously heterodox. Since 1961, she has published fourteen novels, seven short-story collections, seventeen poetry collections, eight books for children , ten book-length works of non-fiction, three edited anthologies, and countless essays and shorter opinion pieces that have appeared in print and electronic media of all kinds. Her works have been translated into at least twenty-one languages, and she is familiar to international audiences from radio and television appearances and the lecture circuit in Canada and abroad. From a literary point of view, however, what is probably most remarkable is Atwood’s interest in genre—not only in terms of the range and variety of forms she employs, but also in the ways in which she frequently exploits generic modes and conventions, at times fusing or otherwise turning genres on their heads in service to what I see as an intellectual agenda that lies at the core of each of her writerly productions. To read Atwood in any and all of the forms to which she turns her prodigious mind (and hand) is to be asked to consider, and to reconsider, challenging propositions that are imbedded in even the most apparently straightforward of her works. Alias Grace is one such tour de force. Atwood has famously, and coyly, observed that Alias Grace is “not a murder mystery, but a mystery about a murder,” adding that “in a murder mystery, you have to come up with the solution, or the readers will rise up against you. You can’t just end it by saying, ‘Well, I don’t know’” (quoted in Basbanes). Clearly, by inference, a “mystery about a murder” may be something else. In any case, the comment is but one of the many cryptic ways in which Atwood draws attention to her novel as a crime fiction, but one that will frustrate the expectations of readers used to the comfortable conventions of detective fiction, that most “consolatory” of genres (Evans 159). Alias Grace fails to comfort or solace, of course, and instead resorts to the use of destabilizing tactics that are themselves wonderfully satisfying even as they call into question the philosophical assurances that are imbedded in formula fiction and help to explain its popularity. On the one hand, Alias Grace stoutly resists categorization, referencing more than one genre and launching competing discourses, as numerous critics have noted.1 At the same time, however, the novel specifically foregrounds the detective genre and interrogates its modes and protocols in direct and challenging ways. Indeed the interplay between “detective fiction” and its putative opposite, “anti-detective” or “metaphysical” detective fiction, constitutes much of the [107.23.157.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:00 GMT) UNDER/COVER | MARILYN ROSE 207 pleasure in reading this text...