The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story, and: Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism

The modern detective story is generally recognized as a creation of the mid-nineteenth century, coincident with the development of the modern police force, the rise of the modern metropolis, and the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. Both of the books under review here expand upon that widely acknowledged point of literary origin to propose an essential connection between detective literature as a form and the “movement” of modernism. But here their resemblance ends. Indeed, the two projects develop completely different conceptions of what detective fiction and modernism are. At the same time, by reflecting opposing forces in the field of contemporary literary criticism, they help to define some of the key terms in the debate over what we mean by the term “modernism” and the degree to which we can connect it to and distinguish it from something else we call “postmodernism.”

Jon Thompson presents detective fiction—from Poe to the present—in political terms, as an expression of cultural hegemony directed against a suspect and subversive other who threatens (either from within or without) the dominance of an imperial culture. He reads detective stories as “intrinsically” modernist because they “offer myths of the experience of modernity, of what it is like to live in a world dominated by the contradictory forces of renewal and disintegration, progress and destruction, possibility and impossibility” (2). The notion of the “modern” here is appropriated virtually wholesale from Marshall Berman’s influential book All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982). But for Thompson the experience of modernist displacement and reconstruction has been primarily shaped in England and America by the tensions implicit in “the imperial enterprise” (8) and the “dynamic energies of capitalism” (138). He construes modernism as “the institutionally and culturally dominant field of literary practices containing residual (realist) as well as emergent (postmodern) elements,” a field he finds particularly fertile for the development of a genre of contested literary value like detective fiction (9). As his title suggests, Thompson’s critique of modernism is firmly grounded in ideology, informed by marxist and Foucauldian thought with more specific debts to figures like Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson. For Thompson, modernism is the product of late capitalism, and detective fiction—itself conquering and colonizing a “residual” evaluative realism—is its essential literary form.

John Irwin, on the other hand, approaches detective fiction as the unresolved exploration of a mystery rather than the imposition of a political or economic regime. The central struggle for mastery that Irwin sees taking place in the genre is not between social factions but between psychological forces within the individual. It is a contest between mind and body, thought and instinct, analyst and the act of analysis. Rather than viewing detective fiction as symptomatic of the alienation produced by ideological or class conflict, Irwin perceives it as expressive of the individual’s internal struggle to analyze his own capacity to analyze, and distinguish himself as a conscious human subject within a modern scientific culture. More difficult to classify methodologically than Thompson’s, Irwin’s book is influenced by his interest in Freud and Lacan, by structuralist paradigms, post-structural intertextuality, and even the more recent revival of autobiographical criticism. The author himself describes the book as a combination of history, literary history, biography, psychoanalysis, and practical and speculative criticism. He enlists these and other critical strategies to make this basic case: the analytic detective story is “the dominant modern genre” because modernity is “an age dominated by science and technology, an age characterized by mental-work-as-analysis,” and the detective story is “a cautionary tale about the mastery of mind and our modern scientific world” (xvi–xvii).

The essential modernist story is, for Irwin, a new version of a very old problem: the mind’s attempt to master itself by dominating the body, “a quest not for God but for the structure of the self” (xvii). At issue in Poe’s invention of the literary detective as disembodied, pure reasoner is the challenge of mastering the carnal, instinctual adversary that the detective confronts in the crime he sets out to solve (best demonstrated in Dupin’s discovery of the orangutan in...