This year we have covered:
Everyday activities
Number
Letter Sounds
Telling the Time
Food
Shopping
Ordering, requesting
Toys
Infinitives
Music
Musical Instruments
Countries
Flags
Colours
Weather
Parts of the body
Big/small, short/long
Songs:
Panda Banda
La Befana
Io ho una palla
Tic, tac
Mamma, che paura
Games:
Lupa mangia frutta
Il Domino della giornata
Bingo
I hope the children have enjoyed their lessons as much as I have teaching them.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
A Mystery of Change: Paper at GSAH Conference, 2009
Sherlock Holmes is not the first detective in fiction, but he is probably the best known. He is, in any case, the first port of call in my analysis of the changes in detective fiction. I am not concerned with an exhaustive study of the genre, or the reasons for its success in the last century or so, but with tracing out a line that will interest us as we seek to examine changes and developments through our culture.
Holmes is an excellent start for us: in his manner, his language and his actions he represents the late Victorian sensibility that gave us so much, for good or ill, of our modern world. Conan Doyle printed his first Holmes story in 1887 and his last in 1914, spanning the time from Victoria’s golden jubilee and the outbreak of war in Europe. A period, of course, that marks the high point of Britain’s Empire and the confident positivist scientific outlook that the British Ruling Classes carried with them to India, Zululand and Ireland.
It is particularly in the progress of science that I am interested. Or rather, it is the very mindset that gave such confidence in the scientific method that drives my enquiry. Holmes stands as a shining example not as some kind of fortune teller or wizard, but of the scientific method properly applied.
"It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect."
[The Adventure of the Dancing Men]
But he has no interest in philosophising about that which does not concern him:
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled around the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
'You appear to be astonished,' he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. 'Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.'
'To forget it!'
......
'But the Solar System!' I protested.
'What the deuce is it to me?' he interrupted impatiently: ' you say that we go round the sun. If we went around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.'
A Study in Scarlet ch. 1
Holmes requires nothing but the relevant facts. Once the data have been acquired, they are processed. That leaves us only the solution.
"You will not apply my precept," he said, shaking his head. "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
The Sign of Four, ch. 6
The science historian and Holmes fan Soshichi Uchii suggests that Conan Doyle was inspired in this facet of Holmes’ personality by the English logician and economist W.S. Jevons. Whether that is the case or not it is certainly clear that Holmes belongs very much to his own time and the positivism and scientific certainty that he represents endures not long beyond the date of his retirement.
Holmes becomes a beekeeper in 1903 on the Sussex Downs, and just two years later the world was turned upside down.
After Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, it is difficult for anyone to be really certain that the logical, scientific process is the only one to live by. It is still harder when we take into account science’s role in the history of the first half of the twentieth century to trust it. Perhaps that is the reason for a shift in the writing of the detective story that occurs about this time.
Carlo Emilio Gadda is not quite as well known as Arthur Conan Doyle, but he did express a wish to write something ‘conandoyliano’ for the mass market. His novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana is today considered to be a masterpiece, but it is a long way from anything that Holmes would appear in. It is a kind of mystery story, of course, with a robbery, a dead woman, and an investigation. But there is something critically lacking: a solution.
The detective in this case, a certain Francesco Ingravallo, is also a kind of intellectual, one who reads ‘strange books’ and philosophises on the job:
He sustained, amongst other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence, or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. (AM 5)
It is this that eventually causes the dramatic evaporation of a solution in the final words of the novel: the constant adding of new causes, the increase of the multitude. Even if all the information is present, the problem is in sorting, understanding, decoding the attempts to communicate. And the information does come to Ingravallo. He is a good policeman, after all, and the difficulties he faces are not caused by his inability to garner knowledge. His instincts are good, too.
Don Ciccio was in a cold sweat. The whole story, theoretically, smelled like a fairy tale to him. But the young man’s voice, his accents, those gestures, were the voice of truth.
(AM 159)
So, even once Ingravallo knows more or less what is true, his job is not even half finished. The sheer weight of evidence, the number of plausible motives, the half-dozen suspects in the end lead only to stagnation and panic. Everything from the buttonhole of his superior to the dying father of the accused Assunta is a further confusion, a further pasticciaccio that needs to be sorted out before the truth will be made clear. And his own humanity, his own emotions and feelings are what gets in the way.
Intolerant of this new mess of the dying patient and yet cautious and pitying, the imagination of Doctor Ingravallo kicked, bucked, galloped, heard and saw: he was seeing and already dismissing the coffin without drapery, of poplar planks.
(AM 384)
There are two problems here, one of scale and one of personality. Certainly, the sheer amount of information that is generated by the investigation is like nothing that we find at any point in the Holmesian canon. But Ingravallo is unable to personally take the step that Holmes realises is essential – he cannot detach himself from the crime he is investigating, the murder of a woman that he may well have even been in love with. Nor can he empty his internal room of all the clutter that is unnecessary. Gadda makes this abundantly clear to us not just by increasing the amount that the police learn but by forcing the reader into the same predicament by piling detail upon detail and digression upon digression, so that we no longer feel steady in our own interpretation of just what is supposed to be happening here.
The technical memento of Bertarelli, of Vitori, of Luis, in those years: then, on reblanched walls at the entrance to every hamlet, the totalitario-politico signs of the Turd: («it is the plow that makes the furrow, but it is the sword that defends it . . . in a pig’s ass»). Sergeant Santarella, Cavaliere Fabrizio, was, was a «great enthusiast» of the Touring Club; as a «life member» he knew its anthem by heart: «The Touring Hymn,» born in Valtellina to the hypocarduccian-hyposapphic Muse of Giovanni Bertacchi: a nobly caesuraed hymn, like the Marseillaise, and like all anthems in general, with a bold impetuousness in the refrain, that ritornello so dear to the hearts of all the life-member motorcyclists:
Forward! And on we go!
Which eliminates, as one can see, any possibility of going into reverse.
The references to Vittorio Luigi Bertarelli and the Touring Club are obscure enough in this passage to give you some idea of the difficulties in just staying on top of the plot: at this point the Carabineri are about to question a number of suspects and uncover the stolen valuables.
The detectives never seem to be quite on top of the case, so differently from Holmes. They are bullying and blustering in their questioning, always trying to trick information out of the suspects and witnesses, never fully in control.
« Signora Liliana, you mean! who had her throat cut by a murderer!» and his eyes were such that, this time, Tina was frightened: «by a murderer,» he repeated, «whose name,» he spoke, curule, «whose full name we know!… and where he lives: and what he does…»
The girl turned white, but didn’t say a word.
« Out with his name!» yelled Don Ciccio. «The police know this name already. If you tell it right now,» his voice became deep, persuasive: «it’s all to the good, for you.»
«Doctor Ingravalli,» repeated Tina to gain time, hesitating, «how can I say it, when I don’t know anything?»
«You know too much, you liar,» shouted Ingravallo again, his nose to hers. «Cough it up, that name: or the corporal’ll make you spill it, in the barracks, at Marino. »
This episode occurs just moments before the famous final scene in which we are not introduced to the murderer, the mask is not pulled away and no-one would have got away for it, pesky kids or no. This moment marks a crisis, not just in the novel but in the world in which the novel is to operate. The surfeit of details, of digressions, of possible connections prevents the novel from reaching any kind of a solution that will satisfy the reader. The author, aware of this, abdicates his responsibility to provide us with that satisfaction that is at the heart of the genre. The ending leaves one rather cold.
And well it might, because the ending recognises the ultimate failure of instrumental rationality. The confidence that reasoning like automata gave us is paid for by the loss of our humanity. One cannot be both a sympathetic man like Ingravallo and have the powers of a Sherlock Holmes. At the same time, we realise that there is a limit to our processing capacity, and that the whole world and everything in it is too much for us to conjure with. Ingravallo may well be right when he thinks that any event is the result of a whole multitude of converging causes, but we have no space – in life or in literature – to work them all out.
So whence our detective fiction? Do we ditch the scientific, logical approach? Or do we simplify, simplify our texts?
In the Martin Beck series of mysteries, a solution is proposed to the puzzle that Gadda sets us in his Awful Mess. Sjöwall and Wahlöö compose real mystery stories, cutting close to the stream of ‘golden age’ fiction that still runs through our landscape. But their man is neither infallible or especially intellectual.
Martin Beck’s closest analogue is perhaps Maigret, or even Poirot. He is interested in the web of human relationships, rather than analysing the crime as a dispassionate scientist. Like Ingravallo, however, he is surrounded by more or less competent assistants, colleagues and superiors who often take up large parts of the narrative to themselves.
These minor characters help to pile on the complexity of the cases that are recounted in the novels. By the constant addition of detail, new suspects, new evidence, the reader – and to some extent, Beck himself – is confused, put off the scent. But it is in the accumulation of these data that the solution emerges, as if by chance. Co-incidence is the secret to Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s brand of mystery writing.
I offer a few examples, some of them rather trivial, from The Laughing Policeman.
‘On the morning of 10 June 1951, that’s to say more than sixteen years ago, a man who was looking for his cat found a dead woman near some bushes near Stadshagen sports ground on Kungsholem here in town.’ The Laughing Policeman 185
‘What do you want to tell me?’ Kollberg said gruffly.
Birgersson smiled.
‘It seems silly,’ he said. ‘But I remembered something this evening. You were talking about the car, my Morris. And…’
‘Yes? And?’
‘Once when Inspector Stenström and I had a break and sat having something to eat, I told him a story. I remembered we had boiled pickled pork and mashed turnips. It’s my favourite dish and today when we had Christmas dishes…’
Kollberg regarded the man with massive disapproval. […]
‘Yes, yes, I see.’ He said impatiently. ‘What did you do?’
‘I used to look at cars.’
‘Cars?’ […]
‘I could recognise all cars forty or fifty yards away, from whichever side I saw them. If I could have taken part in one of those quiz programmes on TV, you know when they ask you some questions on one special subject, I’d have won first prize…’ The Laughing Policeman 214-6
Of course, this accumulation of seemingly useless witnesses, fragments of gossip and accidental discoveries is part of the work of any fictional police force. What is particularly interesting about the way that Sjöwall and Wahlöö work is the way in which these coincidence are dealt with. There is no human genius behind the solution, just blind luck.
Let’s take the longer quote above. It comes from late on in the novel, after a good many people have been interviewed about a mass shooting on a bus in Stockholm. There are a number of leads that are being followed, and this seemingly irrelevant discussion is being held with a man who was part of an investigation by a young detective, Stenström. Stenström was investigating the disappearance of a young woman, the one discovered in the bushes, before he was one of the victims in the bus shooting. In the course of this story it is only now that the information that Kollberg is about to receive will make any sense – the timing (nine thirty in the evening of the 24th of December) is crucial. And unbelievably lucky.
In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, fortune shines on Martin Beck and his team because it is the only way that the detection narrative can be brought to a successful conclusion. It is one possible solution to the problem that Gadda makes clear. And their solution is by no means unsatisfying. In fact, their work is regarded very highly by their peers, critics and mass audiences. My copy of the novel (2007, Harper Perennial) reminds me in the first line of the Introduction that ‘The Laughing Policeman is the only Swedish novel ever to have been made into a Hollywood movie.’ (page v)
One wonders if the avowed Marxism of the authors has somehow brought them closer to the Victorian Conan Doyle, with his belief in the powers of science, national character and the power of justice. Perhaps it is this very philosophical and political belief system that allows the system, the procedure that they write to lead somewhere rather than no-where. Is the answer a kind of Marx of the Gaps, a belief that history is moving, going somewhere, and that it will all work out in the end?
We come last to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pychon. This is a work of postmodernism, and as such it throws up a new set of problems for the reader and the student of detective fiction.
The quotations from other texts are plentiful and variously subtle. The detective is Oedpia Mass, a name taken from the most famous of the early detectives, the riddle solver Oedipus. The dead man in the novel spoke in a ‘Lamont Cranston’ voice. There are fictional texts, the variants in which are spoken aloud, then disappear, are found in the Vatican Library and then give a crucial clue to the mystery at the centre of the novel and perhaps cause an actor/director to commit suicide.
We are not dealing with any old detective novel here, but one that sits atop a whole tradition of crime writing. The reader does not come to this book uncorrupted, but used to the manners and style of the genre. And from the very beginning we are put on our guard. Characters behave like actors. Some of the characters are actors, like Metzger, a lawyer who was a child actor and his friend Manny di Presso, a former lawyer become an actor who plays Metzger, a child actor become a lawyer, in a miniseries. Other characters put on voices: “‘Why do you sing in English accents, when you don’t talk that way?’ asked Oedipa.” The question is addressed to Miles, the lead singer of the Paranoids.
‘Hey blokes,’ yelled Dean or perhaps Serge, ‘let’s pinch a boat.’
‘Hear, hear,’ cried the girls.
(L49 37)
‘Your young man,’ replied Miles, ‘Metzger, really put it to Serge, our counter-tenor. The lad is crackers with grief.’
‘He’s right, missus,’ said Serge, ‘I even wrote a song about it, whose arrangement features none other than me, and it goes like this.’
(L49 101)
While in itself this may be disconcerting for those happiest in the armchair before the fire at 221B Baker Street, what is far more worrying is the paucity of information that Oedipa has to go on. In fact, one cannot be sure at all that there is any mystery for her to investigate.
The only dead body in the tale is that of Pierce Inverarity, a tycoon and former boyfriend of Oedipa Maas. His will, and the task of executing it, leads Oedipa to discover, amongst other things: a secret postal system called W.A.S.T.E. and its history of subversion and blood; an exception to the 2nd Law of thermodynamics; an artificial lake for scuba divers with skeletons imported from Italy; a little-known Jacobean play called The Courier’s Tragedy. Had this been a simple mystery story in the vein of those we are used to, we should expect things to become clearer as these varied pieces approach each other. The fact that things get less clear is not now just a question of finding a solution difficult, but a fundamental doubt over whether or not there is a problem.
‘But there’s another angle too… Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody’s putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?’
It had occurred to her, but like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at that possibility directly.
At the end of the novel, Odeipa finds herself exposed, isolated from the various people who had tried to help her. She is in a horrible position as the last line is written, waiting as the auctioneer clears his throat, to hear whether she has been fooled, whether she has discovered a secret America, or whether she is simply insane. She even hopes that it is this last.
For this, O God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead. (118)
Oedipa sat alone, towards the back of the room, looking at napes of necks, trying to guess which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof. (127)
It is this isolation from others, her failure to communicate with them, their unavailability, that has brought her to this point. Oedipa is alone because of her rejection of the insincere, the false connections that make up Southern California, the highways that lead to no particular place. In her decision to opt out of the modern America – read ‘modern World’ – she has lost, subtly, her grip on reality and the right to interact. Hence there is no solution, and the question of whether there ever was a problem is unanswerable.
As we move from the relatively simple world that Holmes inhabited to the zany cartoon that is Southern California as seen by Oedipa Maas, we see the changes that have affected the culture that produces these artefacts. It shows us how this culture has shifted from a kind of ‘faith in science’ towards no faith at all, not even the expectation that there should be a question to address to ourselves. If Gadda leaves us with the chaos of instrumental rationality, Pynchon opens up to us the terror of the individual’s isolation before the cosmos. This is not the only tale in the history of the genre, nor is this the only genre we could mine. This is not the only important culture that we have to look at. But when we have taken stock of these changes in this moment of human life, we have learned something of our place in the universe.
Holmes is an excellent start for us: in his manner, his language and his actions he represents the late Victorian sensibility that gave us so much, for good or ill, of our modern world. Conan Doyle printed his first Holmes story in 1887 and his last in 1914, spanning the time from Victoria’s golden jubilee and the outbreak of war in Europe. A period, of course, that marks the high point of Britain’s Empire and the confident positivist scientific outlook that the British Ruling Classes carried with them to India, Zululand and Ireland.
It is particularly in the progress of science that I am interested. Or rather, it is the very mindset that gave such confidence in the scientific method that drives my enquiry. Holmes stands as a shining example not as some kind of fortune teller or wizard, but of the scientific method properly applied.
"It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect."
[The Adventure of the Dancing Men]
But he has no interest in philosophising about that which does not concern him:
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled around the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
'You appear to be astonished,' he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. 'Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.'
'To forget it!'
......
'But the Solar System!' I protested.
'What the deuce is it to me?' he interrupted impatiently: ' you say that we go round the sun. If we went around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.'
A Study in Scarlet ch. 1
Holmes requires nothing but the relevant facts. Once the data have been acquired, they are processed. That leaves us only the solution.
"You will not apply my precept," he said, shaking his head. "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
The Sign of Four, ch. 6
The science historian and Holmes fan Soshichi Uchii suggests that Conan Doyle was inspired in this facet of Holmes’ personality by the English logician and economist W.S. Jevons. Whether that is the case or not it is certainly clear that Holmes belongs very much to his own time and the positivism and scientific certainty that he represents endures not long beyond the date of his retirement.
Holmes becomes a beekeeper in 1903 on the Sussex Downs, and just two years later the world was turned upside down.
After Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, it is difficult for anyone to be really certain that the logical, scientific process is the only one to live by. It is still harder when we take into account science’s role in the history of the first half of the twentieth century to trust it. Perhaps that is the reason for a shift in the writing of the detective story that occurs about this time.
Carlo Emilio Gadda is not quite as well known as Arthur Conan Doyle, but he did express a wish to write something ‘conandoyliano’ for the mass market. His novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana is today considered to be a masterpiece, but it is a long way from anything that Holmes would appear in. It is a kind of mystery story, of course, with a robbery, a dead woman, and an investigation. But there is something critically lacking: a solution.
The detective in this case, a certain Francesco Ingravallo, is also a kind of intellectual, one who reads ‘strange books’ and philosophises on the job:
He sustained, amongst other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence, or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. (AM 5)
It is this that eventually causes the dramatic evaporation of a solution in the final words of the novel: the constant adding of new causes, the increase of the multitude. Even if all the information is present, the problem is in sorting, understanding, decoding the attempts to communicate. And the information does come to Ingravallo. He is a good policeman, after all, and the difficulties he faces are not caused by his inability to garner knowledge. His instincts are good, too.
Don Ciccio was in a cold sweat. The whole story, theoretically, smelled like a fairy tale to him. But the young man’s voice, his accents, those gestures, were the voice of truth.
(AM 159)
So, even once Ingravallo knows more or less what is true, his job is not even half finished. The sheer weight of evidence, the number of plausible motives, the half-dozen suspects in the end lead only to stagnation and panic. Everything from the buttonhole of his superior to the dying father of the accused Assunta is a further confusion, a further pasticciaccio that needs to be sorted out before the truth will be made clear. And his own humanity, his own emotions and feelings are what gets in the way.
Intolerant of this new mess of the dying patient and yet cautious and pitying, the imagination of Doctor Ingravallo kicked, bucked, galloped, heard and saw: he was seeing and already dismissing the coffin without drapery, of poplar planks.
(AM 384)
There are two problems here, one of scale and one of personality. Certainly, the sheer amount of information that is generated by the investigation is like nothing that we find at any point in the Holmesian canon. But Ingravallo is unable to personally take the step that Holmes realises is essential – he cannot detach himself from the crime he is investigating, the murder of a woman that he may well have even been in love with. Nor can he empty his internal room of all the clutter that is unnecessary. Gadda makes this abundantly clear to us not just by increasing the amount that the police learn but by forcing the reader into the same predicament by piling detail upon detail and digression upon digression, so that we no longer feel steady in our own interpretation of just what is supposed to be happening here.
The technical memento of Bertarelli, of Vitori, of Luis, in those years: then, on reblanched walls at the entrance to every hamlet, the totalitario-politico signs of the Turd: («it is the plow that makes the furrow, but it is the sword that defends it . . . in a pig’s ass»). Sergeant Santarella, Cavaliere Fabrizio, was, was a «great enthusiast» of the Touring Club; as a «life member» he knew its anthem by heart: «The Touring Hymn,» born in Valtellina to the hypocarduccian-hyposapphic Muse of Giovanni Bertacchi: a nobly caesuraed hymn, like the Marseillaise, and like all anthems in general, with a bold impetuousness in the refrain, that ritornello so dear to the hearts of all the life-member motorcyclists:
Forward! And on we go!
Which eliminates, as one can see, any possibility of going into reverse.
The references to Vittorio Luigi Bertarelli and the Touring Club are obscure enough in this passage to give you some idea of the difficulties in just staying on top of the plot: at this point the Carabineri are about to question a number of suspects and uncover the stolen valuables.
The detectives never seem to be quite on top of the case, so differently from Holmes. They are bullying and blustering in their questioning, always trying to trick information out of the suspects and witnesses, never fully in control.
« Signora Liliana, you mean! who had her throat cut by a murderer!» and his eyes were such that, this time, Tina was frightened: «by a murderer,» he repeated, «whose name,» he spoke, curule, «whose full name we know!… and where he lives: and what he does…»
The girl turned white, but didn’t say a word.
« Out with his name!» yelled Don Ciccio. «The police know this name already. If you tell it right now,» his voice became deep, persuasive: «it’s all to the good, for you.»
«Doctor Ingravalli,» repeated Tina to gain time, hesitating, «how can I say it, when I don’t know anything?»
«You know too much, you liar,» shouted Ingravallo again, his nose to hers. «Cough it up, that name: or the corporal’ll make you spill it, in the barracks, at Marino. »
This episode occurs just moments before the famous final scene in which we are not introduced to the murderer, the mask is not pulled away and no-one would have got away for it, pesky kids or no. This moment marks a crisis, not just in the novel but in the world in which the novel is to operate. The surfeit of details, of digressions, of possible connections prevents the novel from reaching any kind of a solution that will satisfy the reader. The author, aware of this, abdicates his responsibility to provide us with that satisfaction that is at the heart of the genre. The ending leaves one rather cold.
And well it might, because the ending recognises the ultimate failure of instrumental rationality. The confidence that reasoning like automata gave us is paid for by the loss of our humanity. One cannot be both a sympathetic man like Ingravallo and have the powers of a Sherlock Holmes. At the same time, we realise that there is a limit to our processing capacity, and that the whole world and everything in it is too much for us to conjure with. Ingravallo may well be right when he thinks that any event is the result of a whole multitude of converging causes, but we have no space – in life or in literature – to work them all out.
So whence our detective fiction? Do we ditch the scientific, logical approach? Or do we simplify, simplify our texts?
In the Martin Beck series of mysteries, a solution is proposed to the puzzle that Gadda sets us in his Awful Mess. Sjöwall and Wahlöö compose real mystery stories, cutting close to the stream of ‘golden age’ fiction that still runs through our landscape. But their man is neither infallible or especially intellectual.
Martin Beck’s closest analogue is perhaps Maigret, or even Poirot. He is interested in the web of human relationships, rather than analysing the crime as a dispassionate scientist. Like Ingravallo, however, he is surrounded by more or less competent assistants, colleagues and superiors who often take up large parts of the narrative to themselves.
These minor characters help to pile on the complexity of the cases that are recounted in the novels. By the constant addition of detail, new suspects, new evidence, the reader – and to some extent, Beck himself – is confused, put off the scent. But it is in the accumulation of these data that the solution emerges, as if by chance. Co-incidence is the secret to Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s brand of mystery writing.
I offer a few examples, some of them rather trivial, from The Laughing Policeman.
‘On the morning of 10 June 1951, that’s to say more than sixteen years ago, a man who was looking for his cat found a dead woman near some bushes near Stadshagen sports ground on Kungsholem here in town.’ The Laughing Policeman 185
‘What do you want to tell me?’ Kollberg said gruffly.
Birgersson smiled.
‘It seems silly,’ he said. ‘But I remembered something this evening. You were talking about the car, my Morris. And…’
‘Yes? And?’
‘Once when Inspector Stenström and I had a break and sat having something to eat, I told him a story. I remembered we had boiled pickled pork and mashed turnips. It’s my favourite dish and today when we had Christmas dishes…’
Kollberg regarded the man with massive disapproval. […]
‘Yes, yes, I see.’ He said impatiently. ‘What did you do?’
‘I used to look at cars.’
‘Cars?’ […]
‘I could recognise all cars forty or fifty yards away, from whichever side I saw them. If I could have taken part in one of those quiz programmes on TV, you know when they ask you some questions on one special subject, I’d have won first prize…’ The Laughing Policeman 214-6
Of course, this accumulation of seemingly useless witnesses, fragments of gossip and accidental discoveries is part of the work of any fictional police force. What is particularly interesting about the way that Sjöwall and Wahlöö work is the way in which these coincidence are dealt with. There is no human genius behind the solution, just blind luck.
Let’s take the longer quote above. It comes from late on in the novel, after a good many people have been interviewed about a mass shooting on a bus in Stockholm. There are a number of leads that are being followed, and this seemingly irrelevant discussion is being held with a man who was part of an investigation by a young detective, Stenström. Stenström was investigating the disappearance of a young woman, the one discovered in the bushes, before he was one of the victims in the bus shooting. In the course of this story it is only now that the information that Kollberg is about to receive will make any sense – the timing (nine thirty in the evening of the 24th of December) is crucial. And unbelievably lucky.
In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, fortune shines on Martin Beck and his team because it is the only way that the detection narrative can be brought to a successful conclusion. It is one possible solution to the problem that Gadda makes clear. And their solution is by no means unsatisfying. In fact, their work is regarded very highly by their peers, critics and mass audiences. My copy of the novel (2007, Harper Perennial) reminds me in the first line of the Introduction that ‘The Laughing Policeman is the only Swedish novel ever to have been made into a Hollywood movie.’ (page v)
One wonders if the avowed Marxism of the authors has somehow brought them closer to the Victorian Conan Doyle, with his belief in the powers of science, national character and the power of justice. Perhaps it is this very philosophical and political belief system that allows the system, the procedure that they write to lead somewhere rather than no-where. Is the answer a kind of Marx of the Gaps, a belief that history is moving, going somewhere, and that it will all work out in the end?
We come last to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pychon. This is a work of postmodernism, and as such it throws up a new set of problems for the reader and the student of detective fiction.
The quotations from other texts are plentiful and variously subtle. The detective is Oedpia Mass, a name taken from the most famous of the early detectives, the riddle solver Oedipus. The dead man in the novel spoke in a ‘Lamont Cranston’ voice. There are fictional texts, the variants in which are spoken aloud, then disappear, are found in the Vatican Library and then give a crucial clue to the mystery at the centre of the novel and perhaps cause an actor/director to commit suicide.
We are not dealing with any old detective novel here, but one that sits atop a whole tradition of crime writing. The reader does not come to this book uncorrupted, but used to the manners and style of the genre. And from the very beginning we are put on our guard. Characters behave like actors. Some of the characters are actors, like Metzger, a lawyer who was a child actor and his friend Manny di Presso, a former lawyer become an actor who plays Metzger, a child actor become a lawyer, in a miniseries. Other characters put on voices: “‘Why do you sing in English accents, when you don’t talk that way?’ asked Oedipa.” The question is addressed to Miles, the lead singer of the Paranoids.
‘Hey blokes,’ yelled Dean or perhaps Serge, ‘let’s pinch a boat.’
‘Hear, hear,’ cried the girls.
(L49 37)
‘Your young man,’ replied Miles, ‘Metzger, really put it to Serge, our counter-tenor. The lad is crackers with grief.’
‘He’s right, missus,’ said Serge, ‘I even wrote a song about it, whose arrangement features none other than me, and it goes like this.’
(L49 101)
While in itself this may be disconcerting for those happiest in the armchair before the fire at 221B Baker Street, what is far more worrying is the paucity of information that Oedipa has to go on. In fact, one cannot be sure at all that there is any mystery for her to investigate.
The only dead body in the tale is that of Pierce Inverarity, a tycoon and former boyfriend of Oedipa Maas. His will, and the task of executing it, leads Oedipa to discover, amongst other things: a secret postal system called W.A.S.T.E. and its history of subversion and blood; an exception to the 2nd Law of thermodynamics; an artificial lake for scuba divers with skeletons imported from Italy; a little-known Jacobean play called The Courier’s Tragedy. Had this been a simple mystery story in the vein of those we are used to, we should expect things to become clearer as these varied pieces approach each other. The fact that things get less clear is not now just a question of finding a solution difficult, but a fundamental doubt over whether or not there is a problem.
‘But there’s another angle too… Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody’s putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?’
It had occurred to her, but like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at that possibility directly.
At the end of the novel, Odeipa finds herself exposed, isolated from the various people who had tried to help her. She is in a horrible position as the last line is written, waiting as the auctioneer clears his throat, to hear whether she has been fooled, whether she has discovered a secret America, or whether she is simply insane. She even hopes that it is this last.
For this, O God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead. (118)
Oedipa sat alone, towards the back of the room, looking at napes of necks, trying to guess which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof. (127)
It is this isolation from others, her failure to communicate with them, their unavailability, that has brought her to this point. Oedipa is alone because of her rejection of the insincere, the false connections that make up Southern California, the highways that lead to no particular place. In her decision to opt out of the modern America – read ‘modern World’ – she has lost, subtly, her grip on reality and the right to interact. Hence there is no solution, and the question of whether there ever was a problem is unanswerable.
As we move from the relatively simple world that Holmes inhabited to the zany cartoon that is Southern California as seen by Oedipa Maas, we see the changes that have affected the culture that produces these artefacts. It shows us how this culture has shifted from a kind of ‘faith in science’ towards no faith at all, not even the expectation that there should be a question to address to ourselves. If Gadda leaves us with the chaos of instrumental rationality, Pynchon opens up to us the terror of the individual’s isolation before the cosmos. This is not the only tale in the history of the genre, nor is this the only genre we could mine. This is not the only important culture that we have to look at. But when we have taken stock of these changes in this moment of human life, we have learned something of our place in the universe.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Italian Students (Lesson 3)
Hello everyone.
Here is some material based on the class from Thursday 19th March.
Firstly, here are some of the musicians and songs I discussed as forming the Italian popular music tradition. Here is Enrico Caruso singing 'O Sole Mio, Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and Fred Buscaglione performing Che Bambola!
Into the sixties, and the hilariously uncomfortable Adriano Celentano is forced to mime to Azzurro, and Lucio Battisti is nervous, then really gets into singing Un'Avventura at the San Remo song festival.
Then we have Claudio Baglioni's famous Piccolo grande amore, and into the 80s with Pino Daniele singing Yes I Know My Way. You may be interested to know that Simple Minds featured on the album version of this song. Maybe not.
The nineties, and rap, Roman style, with Frankie Hi-NRG MC (really)and Quelli che ben pensano. And now we can get more up to date, with Daniele Silvestri's turn at San Remo, "singing" Saliro'.
If none of that interested you at all, please take it from me that you are not alone. You may, however, be interested in this little video (I'm sorry that it's such poor quality) featuring the famous Gigi Proietti as the peasant. How do Italians tell time?
Again, if you find anything nice online, let everyone know with the comments.
Buon Lavoro!
Here is some material based on the class from Thursday 19th March.
Firstly, here are some of the musicians and songs I discussed as forming the Italian popular music tradition. Here is Enrico Caruso singing 'O Sole Mio, Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma and Fred Buscaglione performing Che Bambola!
Into the sixties, and the hilariously uncomfortable Adriano Celentano is forced to mime to Azzurro, and Lucio Battisti is nervous, then really gets into singing Un'Avventura at the San Remo song festival.
Then we have Claudio Baglioni's famous Piccolo grande amore, and into the 80s with Pino Daniele singing Yes I Know My Way. You may be interested to know that Simple Minds featured on the album version of this song. Maybe not.
The nineties, and rap, Roman style, with Frankie Hi-NRG MC (really)and Quelli che ben pensano. And now we can get more up to date, with Daniele Silvestri's turn at San Remo, "singing" Saliro'.
If none of that interested you at all, please take it from me that you are not alone. You may, however, be interested in this little video (I'm sorry that it's such poor quality) featuring the famous Gigi Proietti as the peasant. How do Italians tell time?
Again, if you find anything nice online, let everyone know with the comments.
Buon Lavoro!
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Italian Students (Lessons 1 & 2)
Hello! If you are reading this, you are successfully connected to the internet, or you are in posession of some strong mind-enhancers.
I hope it is the former, because I am going to post some interesting and helpful links that are related to our first two lessons at Bridge of Allan Library.
First, a little bit of light relief. Here is a video by the Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto. He is from Bergamo and made his reputation writing and drawing cartoons in the 1970s. More recently he has moved on to digital animation. This is one of his short cartoons, explaining subtly the differences between the Italians and other Europeans. The music and sound effects, by Roberto Frattini, are also wonderful.
Next we have an indispensible tool for the student of Italian: a good dictionary. While you will probably want to buy a small dictionary for 'out and about' use, I recommend Garzanti's website as one of the very best online solutions. You may be asked to register to use it, but it is free.
Even less exciting than the dictionary is the difficult issue of verbs. I have spotted a website that looks useful to me: verbs-online.com This will help you practice the conjugation of verbi regolari - regular verbs - in the presente - present tense -, which is all you have to worry about. For now...
I hope these things will prove useful to you. If you find anything else interesting on the internet that relates to the class, please use the comments below to tell me and your fellow students about it.
Buon lavoro!
I hope it is the former, because I am going to post some interesting and helpful links that are related to our first two lessons at Bridge of Allan Library.
First, a little bit of light relief. Here is a video by the Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto. He is from Bergamo and made his reputation writing and drawing cartoons in the 1970s. More recently he has moved on to digital animation. This is one of his short cartoons, explaining subtly the differences between the Italians and other Europeans. The music and sound effects, by Roberto Frattini, are also wonderful.
Next we have an indispensible tool for the student of Italian: a good dictionary. While you will probably want to buy a small dictionary for 'out and about' use, I recommend Garzanti's website as one of the very best online solutions. You may be asked to register to use it, but it is free.
Even less exciting than the dictionary is the difficult issue of verbs. I have spotted a website that looks useful to me: verbs-online.com This will help you practice the conjugation of verbi regolari - regular verbs - in the presente - present tense -, which is all you have to worry about. For now...
I hope these things will prove useful to you. If you find anything else interesting on the internet that relates to the class, please use the comments below to tell me and your fellow students about it.
Buon lavoro!
Monday, February 23, 2009
Jesus and Mary Street
He lay, elongated, on the corner of vias Gesù e Maria and Corso, beneath a sign that read in capitals ‘STOP HERE’. The normally generous people of Rome walked around, or over, his prostrate form, making – no doubt – their interpretations as a single, unified body, a single eye. ‘Young man’ first, then ‘student’ (from his clothes, you see), then ‘fair-skinned’ (American?), and finally ‘drunk’.
As it turns out (and I’m sorry if you’ve heard this kind of thing before), this guy wasn’t really a student, an American, or even really drunk. His eyes were open, although hardly looking at anything, you would think. In any case, there were fewer people stepping around him now, as it was a Wednesday afternoon and it looked like rain.
One of those peculiarly Roman raindrops smacked him on the lips with such accuracy that he was sure, later, that it had been an intentional gesture of the gods of the city. The large, heavy, warm ball didn’t really revive him at that moment, however. It was a strong feminine arm that did that.
The rain in Rome falls rather rarely. When it does, it is a particular joy, washing buildings and streets, making marble and graffiti gleam. The cobbles become slippery; the pavements empty, especially in the area round piazza del Popolo, towards the northern gate, and those who are outside are putting up umbrellas and trying to get indoors as soon as possible.
As for that arm, it was maternal more than anything, and it peeled his head from the pavement, gently though, as if he were really sick. He realised that he was breathing far too quickly, that his body wasn’t ready for this movement, and that it was desperately fighting this upward trajectory. Maybe he was really sick.
“Come on, get up.” And then she added, not so much because it was a fact, but rather as an excuse for having touched him, “It’s raining.”
To his surprise, not only did he get up, but at that exact moment, the rain really started. She lead him down the little shiny street running east, past parked scooters and closed doors, towards a dark green doorway. “Jesus and Mary Street”, he mumbled to himself, and his mouth felt dry and sore. Although it hadn’t really registered at the time, he would later hypothesise that this spontaneous translation had occurred precisely because the strange woman had spoken to him, not in Italian, but in English.
As it turns out (and I’m sorry if you’ve heard this kind of thing before), this guy wasn’t really a student, an American, or even really drunk. His eyes were open, although hardly looking at anything, you would think. In any case, there were fewer people stepping around him now, as it was a Wednesday afternoon and it looked like rain.
One of those peculiarly Roman raindrops smacked him on the lips with such accuracy that he was sure, later, that it had been an intentional gesture of the gods of the city. The large, heavy, warm ball didn’t really revive him at that moment, however. It was a strong feminine arm that did that.
The rain in Rome falls rather rarely. When it does, it is a particular joy, washing buildings and streets, making marble and graffiti gleam. The cobbles become slippery; the pavements empty, especially in the area round piazza del Popolo, towards the northern gate, and those who are outside are putting up umbrellas and trying to get indoors as soon as possible.
As for that arm, it was maternal more than anything, and it peeled his head from the pavement, gently though, as if he were really sick. He realised that he was breathing far too quickly, that his body wasn’t ready for this movement, and that it was desperately fighting this upward trajectory. Maybe he was really sick.
“Come on, get up.” And then she added, not so much because it was a fact, but rather as an excuse for having touched him, “It’s raining.”
To his surprise, not only did he get up, but at that exact moment, the rain really started. She lead him down the little shiny street running east, past parked scooters and closed doors, towards a dark green doorway. “Jesus and Mary Street”, he mumbled to himself, and his mouth felt dry and sore. Although it hadn’t really registered at the time, he would later hypothesise that this spontaneous translation had occurred precisely because the strange woman had spoken to him, not in Italian, but in English.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Campbell MacKenzie Campbell
I have great difficulty absolving myself from the charge of pretentiousness. I do feel, however, that there are certain things I can allow myself without my glasses bothering my pudendal nerve. Some examples:
I can sense whether a book has been translated from French, Russian or Italian into English.
I know the names of the Muses.
I can tell you the story of Turandot.
I invented a story that has become accepted as true by tour guides in a certain European city.
I know the Greek alphabet.
I support Partick Thistle.
Now, any one of these statements might compel you to utter the "all familiar suggestion". And yet each is true. Well, I haven't tested the first one in a while. But it is the last that perhaps gives me most difficulty.
You see, I've met so many people who are Thistle fans (usually 'Partick' fans, actually) because they are not fans of the Pope's Own Rangers or the Crown Defenders of Celtic. These are usually Glaswegians with degrees, career prospects and a bizarre accent that is at the same time broad and syruppy with confidence. A mix that betrays the working class origins of their fathers and the middle class futures of their children. Imagine how James McFadden's kids will speak after 2 years at Gordonston.
I have a recurring nightmare in which I awake as usual, walk to our kitchen and make my wife a caffe latte from our Gaggia machine, stop to glance at the Guardian crossword from the night before and OH MY GOD IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN!!!
To provide a modicum of sanity and to halt this inevitable decline to smug snugness I have designated a part of my personality - an annex - to a character I call Campbell MacKenzie Campbell LLB. He represents everything I fear I could have become - and still might. He buys Art, he is in the Jags Trust, he watches foreign cinema. He likes to learn a bit of the language when he goes abroad. He goes to Pixies concerts and eats sushi.
I check everyday to see how close I am to Campbell. I see in him my destiny, a gradual loss of identity to a monological world that demands my indivduality.
I bet Campbell would keep a blog.
I can sense whether a book has been translated from French, Russian or Italian into English.
I know the names of the Muses.
I can tell you the story of Turandot.
I invented a story that has become accepted as true by tour guides in a certain European city.
I know the Greek alphabet.
I support Partick Thistle.
Now, any one of these statements might compel you to utter the "all familiar suggestion". And yet each is true. Well, I haven't tested the first one in a while. But it is the last that perhaps gives me most difficulty.
You see, I've met so many people who are Thistle fans (usually 'Partick' fans, actually) because they are not fans of the Pope's Own Rangers or the Crown Defenders of Celtic. These are usually Glaswegians with degrees, career prospects and a bizarre accent that is at the same time broad and syruppy with confidence. A mix that betrays the working class origins of their fathers and the middle class futures of their children. Imagine how James McFadden's kids will speak after 2 years at Gordonston.
I have a recurring nightmare in which I awake as usual, walk to our kitchen and make my wife a caffe latte from our Gaggia machine, stop to glance at the Guardian crossword from the night before and OH MY GOD IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN!!!
To provide a modicum of sanity and to halt this inevitable decline to smug snugness I have designated a part of my personality - an annex - to a character I call Campbell MacKenzie Campbell LLB. He represents everything I fear I could have become - and still might. He buys Art, he is in the Jags Trust, he watches foreign cinema. He likes to learn a bit of the language when he goes abroad. He goes to Pixies concerts and eats sushi.
I check everyday to see how close I am to Campbell. I see in him my destiny, a gradual loss of identity to a monological world that demands my indivduality.
I bet Campbell would keep a blog.
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