Dennis Potter's Singing Detective a Place in the Mind David Bell

soundings issue 2 Spring 1996 Dennis Potter's Singing Detective A Place in the Mind David Bell David Bell explores the interior worlds of Dennis Potter Dennis Potter's work has been increasingly in the public eye over the last ten years. He broke the mould of television drama, and achieved this, like any great artist, without intending to, but out of an inner compulsion. Because the television medium was the form in which he realised his dramatic intentions, his genius was not adequately recognised until recent times. To my mind, he reached the peak of his talents in The Singing Detective, where he produced a narrative that broke down the barriers between inner and outer reality, not by obscuring the difference between them, but through a deep exploration of their relationship.' It is in his exploration of the inner world and its relation to external reality that Potter brings concerns that are also central to psychoanalysis. Though, of course, all great artists deal with fundamental problems of our inner world, Potter, most especially in The Singing Detective, makes this concern quite explicit. The narrative structure is non-linear. It weaves back and forth between memory, fantasy 1. Page numbers in the text are from Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective, Faber, London 1986. 91 Soundings and reality. These narrative threads form an ever-increasing coherence as the drama develops over the six episodes. These formal characteristics of the drama constantly illuminate its content. s elsewhere in Potter's work, there is a central concern with the struggle between creativity and destructiveness, with an unflinching capacity to Alay bare for us the most unpleasant sides of human character and to show their sources. He describes an omnipotent character structure built up to deal with unbearable psychic pain, vulnerability and shame. However, this structure becomes detached from its origins and acquires an idealised life of its own within the personality. The Singing Detective was enormously popular because it addresses aspects of the human condition which are universal and which it is my aim in this paper to explore. Because the narrative structure of The Singing Detective is non-linear and multi-layered, it is difficult to provide a synopsis of it without doing considerable disservice to the subtlety of the text. In fact, summarising the drama confronts one with the same difficulty as one encounters when attempting to summarise an analysis: everything is connected to everything else and the same story is told over and over again, yet every time in a slightly different way. The drama takes place over six episodes and the same elements are laid out in each episode. Disparate fragments become clearer as the narrative progresses and the relationship between them is revealed. There are three threads to the narrative, each of which represents a different aspect of psychic reality: the current reality of the central character, his memories and, lastly, his imaginative or fantasy life. Philip Marlow - not Raymond Chandler's detective hero, but a writer of detective stories - a man in mid-life, lies in a hospital bed, suffering a devastating exacerbation of the illness, psoriasis, which he has endured all his adult life. We learn that this is the worst crisis - his illness is at its peak. His whole body is covered in festering sores and the disease has so invaded his joints that he is almost completely paralysed and 92 Dennis rotters Singing Detective constantly in excruciating pain. The author makes it clear that his physical state may be taken as a metaphor for his inner world where he is facing a life crisis arising from his attempt to emerge from a paralysing inner imprisonment. The author refers, in the text, to the hospital ward as 'a place in the mind'. The first narrative thread - his current reality - deals with his life on the hospital ward, his relationships with the ward staff, with other patients and, most especially, with his estranged wife, Nicola. The nurses and doctors appear mainly to be superior, arrogant, self-righteous and devoid of any human concern. They are irritated or embarrassed by any real show of distress. His relationship with Nicola is largely one of clever one-upmanship, which evades the longing for warmth which occasionally breaks through his shell. Despite himself, he develops a passionate attachment to the nurse Mills who looks after him. To emphasise the con current realities, Potter uses the dramatic device of having a fellow patient, Reginald, reading Marlow's novel The Singing Detective to himself throughout the six episodes. arlow lies in his bed full of biting witty invective and relishing an apparent cynicism about life. During his stay, two patients in the M next bed die, and are unceremoniously wheeled out of the ward. For much of the time, Marlow is apparently unmoved by the scenes of pathos, degradation and tragedy that surround him. This is, however, only apparent as his cynical comments almost always have a note of irony. He cries bitterly when Ali, a Pakistani heart patient in the next bed, of whom he had become fond, finally dies. When the pain or feelings of shame and vulnerability become too much for him, he takes refuge in his novel. He is re-writing it in his head. The second narrative thread deals with a different reality: Marlow's childhood memories of critical events in his life which clearly have an important bearing on his current state. It is not clear at times what are to be taken as memories of actual events and what are fantastic distortions of these events, viewed from the 93 Soundings perspective of his at times delirious state. As a young boy, Marlow suffered a major psychological catastrophe which has had enduring effects on his personality. He remembers his parents as unhappily married, living in an empty world of bickering with the paternal grandparents. Young Philip's father appears mainly as a weak man, unable to save the family. Father's fine singing voice, much loved by all at the local club, evokes his son's adoration and admiration. However, his father's strength is more evident on the stage than it is in real life. Philip's mother is unfaithful to his father and he witnesses her lovemaking from up his tree in the woods. Her lover, Binney, is a musician from the band where mother plays and father sings. The boy is devastated by this betrayal and shows his disturbance at school by shitting on the teacher's desk. His tyrannical teacher is more than willing to accept that it was not her star pupil who committed this desecration and believes him when he pins it on the class fool, Mark Binney, the son of his mother's lover. We later learn that Mark ended up as a chronic psychiatric patient; he was the son of mother's lover. hilip's parents split up and his world is devastated when his mother moves him away from father and away from his rural life,to the big city. PIn anger, he confronts his mother, in front of some soldiers on a train, with his knowledge of her infidelity and later even more poignantly in a London underground station. It is, interestingly, at this point that Philip's mother notices the first signs of his illness (psoriasis). The first red patch has made its appearance. In the sequencing of the narrative, this event is repetitively linked with gloomy and threatening images of trains, a terrifying scarecrow in a devastated landscape and Philip's mother calling after him. We later learn that these images refer to the central catastrophe - mother's suicide. So, we are left in no doubt that at the core of Marlow's character is the problem of the terrible pain of unbearable persecuting guilt, which always threatens and from which he is always trying to escape. There appeared to have been no-one in his world to help him with this problem, least of all his loving but weak father. The third thread from which the fabric of the narrative is woven is Marlow's imaginative and fantasy life. This falls into two distinct categories. Firstly, there are his imaginings, fantasies and deliria concerning his current reality. Here fantasy and reality are not distinct. For example, the viewer is led to believe that Nicola, his wife, is cynically betraying him with her lover Binney, both sexually and by stealing his work. It is only later that we learn that this is, in fact, a fantastic 94 Dennis Potter's Singing Detective distortion of reality. Characters in his life on the ward exchange places with characters from his novel. In the second category, there is a quite different type of fantasy activity over which he exerts control (though, at the final crisis, as I will describe below, his control of the products of his imagination breaks down and he then feels controlled by them). It is more like the imaginative-creative work of the writer. From his hospital bed, Marlow is re-writing, in his head, his novel The Singing Detective. The story is a classic spy thriller. There are spies, prostitutes, a mysterious dead woman's body dragged out of a river (a frequently repeated image). The eponymous hero is investigating the murder and gradually closing in on the traitor and cheap thug, Binney. The singing detective is glamorous, witty and sings in nightclubs. One always senses that he will get to the bottom of things and nail Binney. ur hero is pursued by mysterious raincoated figures who spy on him and who, we are told in the text, work for an intelligence organisation.

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