Investigating crime fiction makes us highly attentive to nuance and inference: Poirot’s grey cells will imprison somebody; Holmes is a dream of domestic security. Both detectives and their procedures are forms of closure, ways of sublimating the sublime element of crime fiction under the generic constraint of detective fiction. But not all is lost: early crime writers operate undaunted by detection at the interface of crime and the sublime, transmitting simultaneously to readers Romantic subjectivity and Enlightenment intellectualism, the twin branches of the sublime. It is through inspecting this overlooked and under-examined trauma-rich domain of early crime writing that the authors of this collection claim innovative authority.
Most criminographic writing repeats (obsessively?) the fable of detective fiction. Out of disciplinary procedures came a hero. He, at times she, resolved threats through skill, application, and occasionally courage, from Poe (allegedly) to Doyle to Christie, toughening up in Hammett and Chandler, and more recently finding room to be feminist, black, and more.
Fulfilling the ideological destiny of classic bourgeois fiction, just as Elizabeth Bennett married Darcy in a dream for trapped women, the detective knotted the loose ends of individualist anxiety for the isolated cerebral workers of late capitalism, and imposed the knot as monopoly.
There are inherent problems with this detective-based account. What of those previous formations, Hoffman’s Mme Scudéri or Adolph Mülner’s Der Kaliber; and all those French detectives close to fantasy, from Gallicsymbolic Lecoq through rococo Rocambole to self-identifyingly super-real Fantomas? What of the really tough, and appropriately brainless, dime-novel thief-catchers? Why overlook the fact that Poe’s solutions are all deniable readings of non-crimes – an orang-outang being himself, a self-sought abortion gone wrong, a letter of very dubious import. Why overlook the fact that the great crime fiction series stories are in Freudian terms repetition-compulsions: you keep buying them as consolations because they don’t work?
We can account for the frailty of the detective fable more coherently. As Todorov explains, this is the overt narrative, and when it is put under pressure the skilled analyst can see beneath it the patterns of the real story.
The queries of the previous paragraph in fact direct us to the fact that the fiction of detective fiction is an alibi to conceal the actual impact of the other narrative, the sublime, the underground river of crime fiction – our hidden mighty Po(e). This force pre-existed detective fiction, is in many ways foreclosed, but enduringly remains the dynamo of threat and anxiety that both drives the narrative of crime and insistently demands its euphemisations.
The sublime is the child of the Enlightenment as much as is the disciplinary figure who seeks to control the power of the natural; in fact the sublime is the elder, the wilder of the siblings; disciplinary detection is to sublime crime as if Frankenstein had created a second domesticated monster who settled in the English country house and the Californian mansion rather than ending out on the Arctic ice-field.
Left out in the cold by generations of neat-minded scholars and reviewers, the figure of sublime crime is beating at the window, and the authors in this collection, in welcoming mood, describe its vigour and variety, as well as the rapprochement with forces of modernity like the city and police procedures that will adapt its presence towards disciplinary orthodoxy. Such displacement and condensation (as Freud will reveal how they work) dynamise the powerful undertow by which in all crime fiction the uncanny forces of the sublime continue both to mediate crime and, its most disturbing and most euphemisation-demanding element, validate it as a natural human response to many forms of modernity. A Todorovian might go on to show a third narrative, much too potent to express: the criminal must be caught in fiction because he, she, behaves in a way that is also fully, humanly, rational, though the reverse of conventional normality. And therefore sublime.
Some early writers were aware of their development of stories of crime in the context of the sublime. Maurice Hindle, major scholar of this period, shows how Godwin’s plans for what he called Things as They Are were deeply engaged with Burke and, having used his work as the way in to his Political Justice, he deployed what this analysis calls «the dynamics of sublime language» in narrative in his massively influential novel. It was begun when, in both radical France and conservative Britain, as the original Preface said, «Terror was the order of the day», and Godwin interpreted this tense context through Burke’s dialectic of knowledge and passion. As Hindle shows, from the opening of the text Caleb’s «strong and lively feeling is foregrounded» and he finally confronts, and in the revised version confounds, Falkland in «the language of impressive sincerity». Because of Godwin’s ability to narrativise the Zeitgeist in this way, for readers the novel was compulsive; and for authors like the American Charles Brockden Brown and the Scottish James Hogg, very productive.
Building on his reorientation of criminography in A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, Maurizio Ascari here closely details De Quincey’s conscious and determined integration of Romanticism and domestic disorder. Drawing on rare texts, from Shelley’s neophytic St Irvyne to Lytton’s egregious Zanoni, Ascari outlines the Romantic idea of crime as drawing on «the imperfect character of creation» and even identifies God’s own Contribution to «the evils that plague humanity». This is where De Quincey stands in his extraordinary move to aestheticise but not therefore euphemise murder in an «ironic appropriation of the Kantian sublime»; but Ascari also shows De Quincey’s connection to domestic contexts and sources, notably the rarely considered melodramatic ‘Gothic chapbooks’. This leads to De Quincey’s later development in The Avengers, drawing now on Schiller’s Klosterheim for «the abysses of the psyche» and (speaking of Macbeth) the «fiendish nature» of humanity and the world.
The third in this triptych of what Canadian scholar Struan Sinclair calls «superperceivers» is his own topic, Poe. Well-placed to find passage through the frozen waste of the detective-bound critique, and writing as a psychologist rather than psychoanalyst of literature (not to mention as author of prize wining meta-fiction), he explores the «degree and direction of Poe’s Gothic and Romantic allegiances» in what, for a crowded field, is an unconsidered corner, Poe’s theory of perception. Starting from the distinction between traditional open and modern closed secrets, he explores epistemological implications, showing how Poe both studies and dissolves the closed secret through light, sight and, trickiest of all, glances – Dupin spots the letter out of the corner of his eye. This complex analysis demands its own discourse, and Sinclair adopts Poe’s own – «The story bedizzens» he says, which describes a «perceptual confusion
If Godwin, De Quincey and Poe are the front-row forwards who drive on this pack of romantic criminographers, there are other writers who draw indirectly on Burke through other Romantics and shape narratives and positions that develop – sometimes further, and sometimes consciously less far – the menacing possibilities of sublime crime.
Balzac’s Vautrin in Père Goriot is sometimes thought the first major criminal hero (though not only feminists might vote for Moll Flanders), and yet he has been hard to place because his role is less instrumentally convenient to the ‘detective’ narrative than his near-contemporary and partial source Vidocq. Giacomo Mannironi explains this difference in positive terms as he shows (like several authors here, using little-known texts as a way into the actual situation) how Balzac developed his noir figures through a conscious adaptation of the criminal hero in Scott and Byron, with some general impact from Godwin. In Le Vicaire des Ardennes, Argow is a sailorturned-pirate-turned-banker, and the novel draws, especially for its amatory elements, on Scott’s The Pirate, though Balzac darkens the story. In the sequel Annette et le criminel, Argow’s daring and incursive activities resemble Byron’s Corsair, but, Mannironi argues that the blandly masculine heroics are stiffened with ideas of political resistance drawn from Godwin, as well as a focus on actual crime. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, this analysis shows how Balzac’s strength as a social realist was based on, and inherently retained, an understanding of what the sublime did for fiction and human self-interpretation.
Beyond the referentiality of these authors, the encounter of the Gothic sublime and crime fiction can be seen in hybrid narrative structures from a remarkable concentration – proleptic of the regional triumph of the twentyfirst century – of Scandinavian stories explored by Yvonne Leffler. Steen Blicher turned from his overtly Romantic fiction in The Rector of Velbye to a true-crime based multiple narrative of doubt and guilt, of factual and moral uncertainty. A judge regrets having wrongly executed his wife’s father for a crime that never happened – as if Caleb Williams were being played upsidedown. Similarly, crimes done to, and even worse by, the sensate self recur in Carl Almqvist’s Skällnora Mill, with violent behaviour permeating what Leffler calls «a Gothic nightmare world», where crimes future as well as uncertain ones from the past are explored in a language both semantically labile and difficult to translate. The third of these reappropriations of the Gothic to its northern home, Mauritz Hansen’s Engine-Maker Roolfsen does deploy a detective, no doubt related to its later date of 1839, but the complexities of the sublime remain persistent even in face of such disciplinary constraint, as the resolution is one of puzzled explanation not moral or punitive closure.
This cross-Baltic arc of dark inner drama was paralleled in a calmer but almost as unremembered way by Samuel Warren, doctor and lawyer, eventually to be Master of Lunacy in Victorian London. As Heather Worthington relates, he started with «Tales of Terror» in Blackwood’s Magazine: she shows how the early «The Bracelets» is in fully Eurogothic mode, with close attention to the «repression and transgression» of the
personalised sublime. Written very early, in 1823, and not much admired by Scott, to whom he sent it, Warren published this later after establishing himself with a more disciplinary series in Blackwood’s, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician. Yet he remained committed to the full-on Gothic of his early writing, insisting that publishers produce it if they wanted later work, and indeed re-using some of the elements in his quasi-detective stories – where new plots also display the sensational and irrational as recurrent forces in urban activity. The Gothic element reduces towards the late 1830s when the series ends, but error and delusion still lead to distress and horror, physical and mental: Warren may have become a bureaucrat of the mad-doctor trade, but the danger of ungoverned natural forces still seethe in his texts.
The Gothic sublime has a generalised geography. It can alight secretly in De Quincey’s London and Balzac’s Paris, or haunt Scandinavian rurality and Godwin’s multilocational England, but it is located primarily in passions and people rather than places: Poe’s Rue Morgue is a trope, not an address. Yet there has been a persistent and readily parroted concept of an «Urban Gothic», allegedly seen when in the early 1840s writers like Reynolds (and his rarely mentioned model Sue) created the massively popular and as largely ignored genre «The Mysteries of the Cities». Criminographical veteran Stephen Knight rejects the simple slogan «Urban Gothic» and shows that it was in the displaced form of historical fiction, through Scott, Hugo and Ainsworth, that the modern megalopolis was first narrativised, and that the modernisation of urban anxiety was Sue’s mighty innovation – matched by his potent title, claiming Mystery for the City, not the Church. It follows that the Gothic elements, much over-emphasised as they have been by those who have merely sampled these huge texts, actually derive primarily from popular theatre and journalism, in the demotic cultural life of the cities themselves.
With the increasing social interest in the city and the growing focus on the detective rather than the suffering self, the force of sublime crime became muted by the mid nineteenth century. But not silenced: Dickens’s moralised cityramas are pressed back towards personalised terror by Collins and Braddon, and the sign of the sublime still shines through Holmes’s cocaine habit and his behaviour as an erratic übermensch – it may even be recuperated for orthodoxy in Father’s Brown’s humble holiness. Modern television and popular films can be split into vampire thrillers and urban policing, but have a remarkably shared mimesis; and there are still writers who find crime and sublime make a natural rhyme, and not just in the grand guignol vulgarities of Patricia Cornwell or James Patterson.
In the spirit of modernity and subtlety even the name adopted by ‘B. Akunin’ is a mystery offering both depth and inherently Gothic challenge, as Gabriella Imposti shows in an essay that both reveals the long-exiled riches of Russian crime fiction, and the elegant intelligence of the widely-acclaimed recent novels by Grigorij Čchartišvili. Looking back in time towards the origins of criminography, and reading crime and blame with all the subtlety of post-modernity, inviting us to think his pseudonym refers to Bakunin but in fact making a wider anarchical reference than that (as the excellent detective Imposti finally reveals), Čchartišvili reinvents the criminal sublime with the searching wit, and wisdom, of Italy’s own Eco.
Nor is he the only one now writing at this level. This collection of essays concludes with Matthias Stephan on the ultra-modern and retro-intellectual work of ‘Michael Gregorio’, paying close attention to the remarkable novel Critique of Criminal Reason in which Kant himself through his ‘acolyte’ Hanno Stiffeniis, plays a role in both the detection of the human condition and the understanding of a crime. Stephan’s comments return referentially to other discussions in the collection: he shows how ‘Gregorio’ is «blurring the lines between varied forms of detection»; «subverting the very possibility of solving a crime»; «undermining the epistemic closure characteristic of the genre»; working towards «the metaphysics» of crime. Stephan notes that as the postmodernists have asserted, and Stefano Tani has importantly explored in crime fiction in The Doomed Detective (we applaud the title), under intellectual pressure the detectival certification of certainty will dissolve into improbability. That long-dominant approach has sought to foreclose the dynamic forces that were realised in intellectual, literary and ontological terms at what Stephan and this collection interrogate: «the convergence of the English Enlightenment and Romantic periods.»
Convergence continues. For the many questions raised in this issue of La Questione Romantica, Stephan and the ‘Gregorio’ authors provide responses, not answers, that are appropriately final, but not finite – and there is aporia, as there always was for Burke. To experience the vitality, the living antiquity, of the criminographical Gothic, readers can finally sweep on to the modern sublime crime of a ‘Gregorio’ story.
This issue of La Questione Romantica was edited by Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight.