Paradoxes vs. Contradictions

Peter Messent, ed., Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1997. ix + 252 pp.

In Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, Franco Moretti (1997 [1988]) echoes and extends formalistic and Marxist critiques of detective fiction (initiated, respectively, by Viktor Shklovsky [1991 {1929}] in Theory of Prose and Pierre Macherey [1978 {1966}] in A Theory of Literary Production), labeling that genre “radically anti-novelistic” (137), characterizing it as a chimera that “owes its success to the fact that it teaches nothing” (138), and condemning it as “literature that desires to exorcise literature” (emphasis in the original) (146). Still, Moretti is obviously fascinated by such “modern serialized narrative, which thrives upon paradox,” relying for its effect on “a perennial fixity” of plot “syntax” and “a continuous novelty of content” (141). He feels that “a sociology of literature” (130) might lead to a deeper understanding of detective fiction’s aporetic strength. At the heart of any such project lies a process that Moretti calls “divarication,” where “structural and functional hypotheses” are run “against each other” and each acts as the “potential falsifier” (131) of the other, while providing a sense of a totality that somehow exceeds its components. Criminal Proceedings, a frequently provocative and eminently useful collection of eleven essays by various British authors, takes up the Morettian challenge, with varying degrees of success. While its articles infrequently settle for uncovering mere contradictions rather than full divaricative paradoxes, this collection nevertheless manages, in its most original efforts, to offer substantial contributions to a true “sociology of literature.”

Evelyne Keitel (1994: 171) correctly characterizes detective fiction as “a genre of variation,” and Criminal Proceedings stumbles significantly only when it disregards the potential for paradox in Keitel’s observation and instead uncritically groups under the category of “crime fiction” genres with very different structures and functions: hard-boiled detective novels, anti–detective novels, police procedurals, anti–police procedurals, thrillers, legal fiction, and crime and science fiction films and television shows. The collection begins promisingly when Peter Messent, who cites Moretti’s ideas on detective fiction in the introduction, asserts that “the move from private-eye novel to police procedural” helps to revivify that troublesome genre because such a tendency makes clearer this “ambiguity at the heart of the private-eye form”: a general “endorsement of the social status quo” despite repeated, often formulaic, revelations of “the deep-seated corruption of the public world” (2–3, 8, 18). Even though central contentions in Messent’s essay are bolstered by Barry Taylor’s examination of blurred distinctions (in terms of Michel de Certeau’s [1984 {1980}] categories of “tactics,” which are “determined by the absence of power,” and “strategy,” which “is organized by the postulation of power” [38; emphasis in the original]) between police and criminals within Elmore Leonard’s fiction, the collection tends to lose focus when the implications of the movement from detective novel to police procedural are left behind, and rather traditional, though nonhegemonic, investigators are scrutinized in Liam Kennedy’s “Black Noir: Race and Urban Space in Walter Mosley’s Detective Fiction,” Sabine Vanacker’s chapter on “the feminist detective hero” (62), and David Murray’s generally creditable defense of Tony Hillerman’s use of Navajo investigators, settings, and culture. Interesting in their own right, though moving even further from the ostensibly Morettian orientation of the collection, are the chapters by Nick Heffernan and Brian Jarvis. Heffernan delves into how “the lawyer-procedural exploits the current fascination with lawyers and the legal apparatus,” providing “within the framework of a suspense narrative a set of meditations on American hyperlexis and the status of the lawyer as American hero or hate figure” (190). Jarvis analyzes “body horror” in some detective films and television shows of the 1980s (David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, the Die Hard films, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), entertainments that employed “patriarchal power, reproduction of Oedipal narratives and bursts of blatant misogyny&#8221...