Actualizing Narrative Structures: Detective Plot, Fantasy, Games, and the Erotic

CHAPTER FIVE Actualizing Narrative Structures: Detective Plot, Fantasy, Games, and the Erotic I would advise in addition the eschewal of overt and self-conscious discussion of the narrative process. I would advise in addition the eschewal of overt and self- conscious discussion of the narrative process. John Barth Fowles's novel is explicitly and self-consciously auto-referential. Its thematization of the role of the reader and of the ontological status of the text works both to create and to break down artifice. The reader has his orders and is not allowed to ignore them; like Charles's, his freedom is a real, though an induced one. But what if the author decides to assume that his reader already knows the story-making rules? He would still imbed certain instructions in the text, but these would not be in the obvious form of direct addresses. Therefore this would be a more “covert” version of diegetic self-reflectiveness. The act of reading becomes one of actualizing textual structures, and the only way to approach these narcissistic forms (as well as their implications) would be by means of those very structures. At the diegetic level there appear to be certain models favoured by metafictionists as internalized structuring devices which in themselves point to the self-referentiality of the text. It should be noted that the four models singled out earlier- detective plot, fantasy, games, and the erotic-are in no way exclusive, but represent only four- of the most visible forms presently in use in metafiction. 1. THE DETECTIVE STORY In order to understand the internalized functioning of this model in metafiction, one must isolate first the three major characteristics of detective fiction that are relevant to this discussion: the self- consciousness of the form itself, its strong conventions, and the important textual function of the hermeneutic act of reading. 72 / Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox To begin with, the detective story is almost by definition intensely self-aware. Often this will take the form of a writer of detective stories within the novel itself: Latimer, the academic turned novelist in Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, is offered a banal plot for a novel by one Colonel Haki. However, through this latter fellow, he takes up instead a real life investigation which ends in the death of the hunted man, Dimitrios. Only then is Latimer free to write his next novel. However, he rejects the tale the reader has been reading, which he deems unsuitable- messy, not tidy and artistic enough. In fact his projected plot opening is not unlike the Colonel’s suggestion, previously scorned as banal. Similarly, thought in a less complex manner, the murderer’s manuscript at the end of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, calls the reader’s attention to the text’s mise en abyme: It was my ambition to invent a murder mystery that no one could solve. But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gainsaid. 1 In this same novel there is a good example of the other kind of self- consciousness that abounds in the genre- the character’s belief that certain things occur in life (that is, the novel), others in fiction. Just before he dies, the first victim merrily refuses to leave the island: “Ought to ferret out the mystery before we go. Whole thing’s like a detective story. Positively thrilling.”2 In Have His Carcase, Dorothy Sayers’ detective-novelist heroine, Harriet Vane, agrees with the sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey: “One wouldn’t make an intending suicide take a return- ticket in a book, but real people are different.”3 This last point brings up the second above-mentioned concern, the strong conventions of order and logic in detective fiction which Harriet Vane knows are to be obeyed because the reader expects them and needs them in order to read the work, in order to participate in the case. It is this very store of infinitely reworkable conventions that is acknowledged and exploited, “re-contextualized,” by metafictionists such as Robbe-Grillet and Borges. The third point of interest arises from this active participation of the reader in detective fiction. The act of reading is here an act of interpretation, of following clues to the answer of a given problem.4 The hermeneutic gaps a re textually functional in an explicit manner here, but the process is emblematic of that of reading any novel. It is this realization that covertly narcissistic metafiction exploits. Often a detective story will explicitly thematize this hermeneutic paradigm. In a double mise en abyme (Ellery Queen 1 In Christie Classics (1924; reprinted, New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., n.d.), p.317. 2 Ibid., p.205 3 (1932; reprinted, New York: Avon, 1968), p.82. 4 See Frank Kermode, “Novel and Narrative” in John Halperin (ed.), The Theory of the Novel: New Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially pp. 159-68. Actualizing Narrative Structures / 73 [really Messieurs Lee and Dannay] always writes about himself in the third person), Ellery's novel, The Finishing Stroke, contains within itself quotation from his first novel, The Roman Hat Mystery. This citation is presented as a "Challenge to the Reader" at the start of the third book. The reader is informed that he now knows everything that the chief sleuth does and can proceed by a series of logical deductions and psychological observations to the solution of the mystery. A reality of all reading, this can also be allegorically worked out, as in several of the Simenon novels. In The Methods of Maigret, for example, the discreet, self-effacing, intelligent Inspector Pyke is the reader's surrogate, as he follows Maigret around trying to discern his famous methods. Pyke impassively sifts his every gesture and word, much to Maigret's annoyance, for Maigret yearns to discover his colleague's thoughts about himself and the case at hand. Like the reader's, these thoughts are inaccessible. The logical deductions demanded of the reader place him more often, however, in the shoes of the detective himself, be he an active investigator or an arm-chair wizard. False trails may be laid for both of these interpreters but the evidence discovered must be shared by the sleuth with the reader; it is not fair of Watson in the Sherlock Holmes tales to withhold details from the reader, for instance. If the latter is the sleuth's surrogate, then perhaps the author is the criminal's. G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories make this allegory clear. In "The Blue Cross," the detective, Valentin, realizes that the criminal is a creative artist and he, the chasing detective, merely a critic. Flambeau, the master criminal, artistically attempts to match his crime to the season or the landscape (see "The Flying Stars"). He continues to function as the imaginative force even after giving up a life of crime, leaving the critic's work always to Father Brown. (In a fit of moral and perhaps creative frustration, Valentin, on the other hand, turns clever criminal in "The Secret Garden.") It is perhaps not hard to see now why this genre should appeal to metafictionists as a structuring model. It also appeals on the overt level, of course, as witnessed in Nabokov's parody, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, of the detective plot in his hero's mystery novel, The Prismatic Bezel, itself seemingly a parody of Agatha Christie's Three Blind Mice. The entire novel (Nabokov's) is itself based on the detective structure as the narrator seeks the "truth" about the novelist, Knight, and the reader seeks the "truth" about the novel he reads. Is it fictive autobiography? Pure fiction! Biography? But, as Nabokov writes in The Eye: "The stress is not on the mystery but on the pattern."5 His Despair is about a failed murder; Lolita and Pale Fire end in murder. The stylized properties of detective fiction-when either parodied overtly or 5 (New York: Phaedra, 1965), p. 10 74 / Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox covertly used as structural principles-are employed to point to the text in its existence as literature, as patterned, ordered art. Two of the writers of metafiction who most interestingly use this model are Robbe-Grillet and Borges. The latter, as well as having anthologized and translated detective stories, has written a volume of them himself -Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi- whose punningly named hero is unavoidably an arm-chair detective, since he is in jail. In his other short metafictional pieces, Borges usually internalizes a puzzle or enigma structure, and often the mystery variant of it, as in the case of "Death and the Compass." Lönnrot, the detective, sees himself as a "pure thinker" (à la Dupin) and divines the "secret morphology" of the crimes- crimes which he has brought about himself. His enemy, Red Scharlach, had read in the papers of Lönnrot's abstruse theory to account for a murder of a rabbi. It was based on Hasidim texts and so Scharlach had plotted the equally abstruse trap for the detective with his own plan. Like the reader, Lönnrot feels the obvious-and incidentally, true-explanation for the first murder to be "possible but not interesting" and so, like the author, sets up the rest of the narrative. The detective predicts-in time and place-the final murder of the series, unaware that it is his own. As he wanders in what is to be his death-place, Triste-le-Roy, the strange house seems to him larger than it is, due to the "penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude"- an allegorical description of the effect of this self-mirroring story on the reader.

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