Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: Two New Types

of Nostalgia in Detective Fiction

Thesis Research Master Literary Studies, University of Amsterdam Roos Gravemaker Gravemaker 2

Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: Two New Types of Nostalgia in Detective Fiction

by

Roos Gravemaker

Supervisor: Dr. Kristine Johanson Second Reader:

Date of Submission: 22 October 2018 Student no.: 10424911 Tel.: +316 48036022

Abstract:

Keywords: nostalgia, detective fiction, memory, trauma, narrative, performance, melancholia

Declaration of Academic Integrity: I hereby declare that I have read and understood the UvA Regulations on Fraud and Plagiarism. I am fully aware that failure to act in accordance with these regulations can result in severe consequences. I confirm that this thesis is entirely my own work and that contributions from other sources are fully acknowledged.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: A World in Ruins ...... 4 Detective Fiction and Nostalgia: The Longing for a Lost Home ...... 4 Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia ...... 9 Primary Sources and Structure of Thesis ...... 10 Chapter 1: Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: An Explanation ...... 14 Boym’s Restorative Nostalgia and Reflective Nostalgia ...... 14 Reconstructive Nostalgia: Trauma and Homebuilding ...... 15 Preservative Nostalgia: The Safeguarding of Home ...... 19 Conclusion ...... 21 Chapter 2: Traumatized Detectives: Reconstructive Nostalgia, the Figure of the Child, and the Struggle of Homebuilding ...... 23 Mirroring Traumas ...... 24 Detective Fiction and the Case of Trauma ...... 27 The Child: A Figure of Reconstructive Nostalgia ...... 30 Conclusion ...... 35 Chapter 3: Dancing with your Dead Colleague and Saving Mum and Dad: Preservative Nostalgia and the Melancholic Performance of Memory in Detective Fiction ...... 37 Banks’s and River’s Lost Pasts ...... 38 Melancholic Detectives ...... 40 Performance and Preservative Nostalgia ...... 43 Conclusion ...... 51 CONCLUSION: The Detective and the Ruins of the Home ...... 52 Bibliography ...... 56

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INTRODUCTION A World in Ruins

Detective Fiction and Nostalgia: The Longing for a Lost Home A specter haunts detective fiction – the specter of nostalgia. The BBC detective television series Father Brown (2013-), loosely based on the short stories by G.K. Chesterton, are set in the early 1950s in the fictional Cotswolds village of Kemblefold where Father Brown (Mark Williams), a priest at St Mary’s Catholic Church, solves murder cases. With Father Brown’s rural and period setting, Lawson claims that the series “continues BBC1's recent mission to bring back afternoon drama to TV: the sort of nostalgically reassuring fiction that was traditionally offered to those who were at home after lunch” (Lawson n.p.). Likewise, in The New York Times Hale writes that Endeavour, Channel 4’s prequel to the famous Inspector Morse series (1987-2000), gives “another opportunity to wallow, tastefully in nostalgia for its predecessor” (Hale n.p.). Even detective fiction set in the present day seems to be saturated by nostalgia. Of Robert Galbraith’s (J.K. Rowling) Cormoran Strike detective novels, Hughes writes that even though the stories take place in London, the atmosphere is “oddly nostalgic” (Hughes n.p.). Ben Richards, who adapted the first two novels into a television series for the BBC, adds, “It does feel very different tonally and visually from other crime dramas (…) There’s something interestingly retro about it while also remaining contemporary – it does have Gravemaker 5 a bit of a Morse-like quality” (in Hughes n.p.). And so, from the regeneration of old detective icons to modern detectives with a “retro-feel” in television series, film, and literature, the detective genre is a site where nostalgic sentiments flourish. Indeed, nostalgia is an inherent part of the formula of the detective story. The detective story is one of return and repetition: the detective returns, again and again, to the crime scene, digs into the histories of victims and suspects, while often struggling with the troubles and ghosts of their own past, longing obsessively to connect with the crime which is manifested only in the past. Nostalgia, Munt argues, is a staple of the detective genre (142). The detective’s investigation, their search for the truth behind the mystery of the crime, is defined by a longing for restoration. The detective is engaged in “an act of recovery, moving forward in order to move back” (Porter in Connelly 93). Connelly argues that detective fiction encourages its characters to long for the past as the keeper of the truth and salvation, “to view the past as holding the solution, in a sense, and to view the past through the lens of nostalgia” (Connelly 93). Despite the detective’s pursuit of the recovery of the “core truth” of a past crime, the genre also mourns the fact that its characters can never return to the same place, the exact same state before the devastating effects of the crime, but only hold a memory of it: one cannot undo the effects of the crime or bring the murdered victim back to life. This unbridgeable distance between past and present, and the difficulty of past’s retrieval, illustrate that the driving force behind the detective genre is, as Munt asserts, “a nostalgic displacement of the present” (136), or the inability to (re)connect the past with the present and vice versa. Nostalgia is the lament for being displaced both in time and space. The term itself was first coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688, when he combined the Greek word nostos (return home) and algia (pain) to baptize a new disease of homesickness from which he believed many ‘displaced’ people in 17th century Europe suffered, from foreign students and servants working in France and Germany to Swiss soldiers fighting abroad (Boym 3). Nostalgia thus finds its roots in medicine and originally meant ‘homesickness’. This longing for a lost homeland can be translated to the desire for a past time: a moment before, when the homeland was not yet beyond the nostalgic’s grasp. Both the nostalgic and the detective are defined by sentiments of displacement through the irretrievable loss of a certain home or time. The detective’s nostalgia does not only refer to the pain for a lost homeland but also for a general sense of feeling at home in the world. As Svetlana Boym argues:

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“To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you: it is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia” (251).

In detective fiction, the disturbance of social order due to the events of the crime can result in similar feelings of displacement. Both the nostalgic and the detective attempt to solve these sentiments of dislocation by turning to the past: while the nostalgic longs for the retrieval of a lost intimacy, memory, or utopia, for the detective, this desire for a past to return is symbolized by, as Bennet and Royle assert, its “generic investment in the restoration of the status quo” (203). The detective’s endeavour to solve the crime and catch the criminal, thereby restoring and re-establishing the order or status quo that was disturbed in the wake of the crime, mirrors the nostalgic’s longing for retrieving the lost intimacy with the world. In its focus on the disturbance and restoration of the status quo, previous academic research on the presence of nostalgia in crime and detective fiction has generally focused on the ways in which nostalgia is used to engage with socio-political issues. With its presence of a detective who often “take[s] on the role of a judge or even that of an avenger” (Pyrhrönen 52) and its themes revolving around issues of social justice, detective fiction is a site where ideological notions are often explored. Pyrhrönen argues that given detective fiction’s popularity and mass production, critics often work from the assumption that the genre’s function is to reproduce values and ideas that maintain the ideological status quo:

“Defining ideology as specific strategies for legitimating the power of dominant social groups, critics maintained that operations of ideology are seen in the formal elements and ideas that the detective fiction chooses from the discourse circulating in culture. Ideology this shapes both the structures and themes of the genre” (Pyrhrönen 47).

This tendency to continuously return to a reassuring status quo is often realized by resorting to conservatism or images of a safe past, revealing the implicit nostalgic tendencies of the genre. In traditional detective fiction, nostalgia is not only interwoven in its themes and motives but in its narrative conventions as well. According to Godsland, the nostalgic sentiments of the detective fiction are articulated not only through “a hankering after the past but also (…) in the return to bourgeois “order” implicit in the narrative closure traditional to the genre” (258). Therefore, the return to a prior state of order through the solution to the crime – which is an inevitable moment in the detective story, since the narrative will otherwise not Gravemaker 7 fulfill the requirements set by the traditional genre conventions of detective fiction – demonstrates the intrinsic nostalgic tendencies of detective fiction. In addition to including elements that confirm and sustain the socio-political status quo, many works of detective fiction also question the process of justice, and contest (existing) social conditions. In detective fiction’s critical commentary on socio-political circumstances, nostalgia can function as a way to ascribe current social problems to the loss of a “glorious” past. For instance, investigating the hard-boiled detective novels of Russian author Alexandra Marinina, Baraban argues that these novels, written in the 1990s, express sentiments of nostalgia for the Soviet past. Set in a milieu where crimes are ascribed to the failing, modern post-Soviet state, Marinina’s novels show a desire for a radiant past, a place that still contained the qualities that were supposedly typical of Soviet life: egalitarianism, collectivism, and support. Thus Marinina’s detective, Baraban claims, “yearns for a world in which there are no such failings or in which the failings are manageable” which “triggers nostalgia for the Soviet past” (98). Similarly, in Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series, we see a detective who, likewise, does not feel at home in a contemporary Italy that is defined rapid industrialization and fast globalization (Kolsky). Like Marinina’s Soviet nostalgic detective, Kolsky argues that for inspector Montalbano, nostalgia serves as a defense mechanism against his feelings of displacement in the modern world; his nostalgia is “a yearning for community and stab[ility], [a] ‘traditional’ identity in a globalized world” (436). Lastly, rather than using nostalgia to explore a glorified past, the detective’s longing for the past can also be employed to investigate or enquire after a national history that is defined by problematic, sensitive, or traumatic issues, caused, for instance, by war, dictatorial regimes, violence, etc. In this, the investigative process of the detective story is paralleled by an examination of the country’s own national past. As Godsland writes, “remembering and nostalgia are deployed not only to resolve a crime, but also to investigate the national past as it is structured as ‘official’ history and ‘unofficial’ personal or collective memory” (254). In this context, remembering and nostalgia are not only employed to resolve a crime but also to investigate a national past that is otherwise too painful or inaccessible. Works like these that share a nostalgic preoccupation with a lost homeland have simultaneously been the subject of stark criticism. Susan Stewart’s often cited On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection even calls nostalgia a “social disease” (iv). According to Stewart, a connection with the past is only possible through narrative. Time is a textual phenomenon, “lending itself to the formation of boundaries and to a process of interpretation delimited by our experience with those boundaries” (13), and so Gravemaker 8 history is “a convention of the organization of experience in time” (6). From this she concludes that nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always lead by ideology; the past it seeks has never existed except as a narrative and so it has, because reality is constructed through language, always been absent. Stewart consequently argues that nostalgia is a “sadness without an object” (23): the desire which the nostalgic seeks is “the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire” (23). Nostalgia is the “desire for desire” (23). Following Stewart’s line of thought, critics often characterize nostalgia as a delusional idealization and whitewashing of the past: it suggests being ““out of touch”, reactionary, even xenophobic” (Su 2). As Jackson Lears writes, nostalgia continues to be “the bete noire of every forward-looking intellectual, right, left, or center” (Lears in Su 59). While memory, as Su claims, involves intimate personal experience that can function as a counter reaction to national and institutional histories, “nostalgia signifies inauthentic or commodified experiences inculcated by capitalist or nationalist interests” (Su 2). In this context, literary scholars have generally treated nostalgia in literary fiction with skepticism and tended to deconstruct its problematic nationalist inclinations. Stewart’s depiction and theorization of nostalgia reveal another likeness between the nostalgic and the detective. For Stewart, nostalgia revolves around the organization of (imagined) experiences, or the construction of narratives about the past, and this practice can also be found in detective fiction. Namely, like Stewart’s nostalgic who can relate to the past only via narrative, detective fiction also revolves around the search and construction of a certain narrative, i.e. the story of the crime. Narratologically, detective fiction is a genre that deals with storytelling and actually takes narrativity as a problem, a procedure, and an achievement. Following the formalist tradition, Tvetan Todorov divided the detective narrative into two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. The story of the crime is a story of absence; “its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book” (46), and in the course of the novel, the story of the crime is gradually reconstructed through the investigative methods of the detective. On the other hand, the story of the investigation explains how the narrator “has come to know about [the story of the crime]” (45). Both stories therefore display that detective fiction is essentially about narrative and the act of storytelling itself: it revolves around the construction of an unknown story (the crime) and gives an account of how the novel itself came into being (the investigation). Detective fiction’s nostalgic tendencies thus also lie in its preoccupation with the construction of a narrative around the past. This thesis, however, does not view nostalgia in a socio-political and ethical context: it does not study the nostalgia present in detective fiction in order to say something about the nostalgic tendency to idealize and romanticize the past. Nor does it, alternatively, look for the Gravemaker 9 ethical possibilities of nostalgia and how it can, as Su proposes, “provide a means of establishing ethical ideals that can be shared by diverse groups who have in common only a longing for a past that never was” (3). Rather, it moves away from the political debate and analyzes what nostalgia does in terms of narrative, and how it is interwoven in the genre conventions of detective fiction. In other words, while earlier scholarship on nostalgia in detective fiction and its ideological implications locates the debate in the public, I want to relocate the debate to the private and the individual. Additionally, I argue that the ways in which nostalgia has hitherto been discussed in literary debates do not always entirely apply to detective fiction. The genre conventions of detective fiction require a different narrative of nostalgia than the ones (like Svetlana Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia) that have hitherto been employed in literary studies. Instead, I propose the concepts of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia as two new forms of nostalgia to be employed for characterizing the longing for the past that is present in detective fiction.

Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia I want to introduce the two types of nostalgia as an expansion to the field of criticism around nostalgia. In my conceptualization of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia, I have used Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia as my focus. In Chapter 1, I define these two nostalgias, and clarify their relationship to Boym’s dichotomy. In this chapter I also provide a small case study for each nostalgia to further define them as concepts. I refer to Boym because her work has been a major influence in studies and scholarship on nostalgia. Focusing mainly on former Yugoslavian and Russian cultural objects and phenomenon, The Future of Nostalgia is widely used in the study of nostalgia in post-soviet and former communist contexts. For instance, reflecting on the ‘Yugo-nostalgia’, or the attempt “to recreate a shared cultural memory” within the problematic social context of the post-Yugoslavia era (Volčič 21), Volčič refers to Boym’s two nostalgias in order to highlight the paradox of Yugo-nostalgia in “invoking a longing for the very past whose destruction engendered it” (26). Within a similar post-communist context, Lu likens the “Mao Zedong Fever”, the spontaneous nostalgia for Mao and his era that was expressed during the 1990s, to Boym’s totalitarian nostalgia in Russia “in which the Mao fever can find an echo” (Lu 185). Boym’s work has also been of influence for studies that dismiss understanding nostalgia as a form of sheer conservatism, and instead explore its ethical possibilities in being able to provide ideas and blueprints for a prosperous future. Bradbury, for example, suggests that Boym’s reflective nostalgia can be used to “recuperat[e] the past in ways that can be directed forward rather than attempting to recreate in Gravemaker 10 the present, the worlds and spaces of the past” (344). The critical thinking that comes with this type of nostalgia can be applied to finding ways of constructing a better future. As Su further claims, reflective nostalgia is no longer a disease but an admiration for “ideals associated with premodern societies” (Su 4). Boym’s work on nostalgia has, then, been influential for how scholars have explored the concept of nostalgia. I put forth reconstructive nostalgia and preservative nostalgia to offer a corrective to the discussion of nostalgia within the genre conventions of detective fiction. A new language or characterization of ways of relating to the past are needed in order to talk about nostalgia in detective fiction. Therefore, even though nostalgia can generally be understood in terms of ‘homesickness’, feelings of displacement, and loss, people can, as Boym argues, “[tell] very different stories of belonging and nonbelonging” (41). There is thus not only one type, experience, or story about nostalgia but several which all have their different narratives and ways of relating to the past. Briefly, for the reconstructive nostalgic, the past is incomplete and fragmented through which they no longer ‘feel at home’ in the world. Frantically, they try to reconstruct a narrative around that past in order to ‘solve’ the feelings of displacement they experience in the present. Once the detective comes with the solution to the crime, the feelings of displacement are, presumably, lifted through which they can start to feel “at home” in the world again. As for the preservative nostalgic, their longing for the past is characterized by the fact that they do not wish to depart from their idealized notion of it. In relation to detective fiction, rather than a quest for the ‘Truth’, the task of the preservative nostalgic detective therefore concerns the safeguarding and conservation of their particular version of the past. These two types of nostalgia thus offer a new narrative of nostalgia and relating to the past than has hitherto been discussed in scholarship.

Primary Sources and Structure of Thesis This thesis explores the ways in which the detective genre possesses nostalgic tendencies and how these nostalgic sentiments are explored in detective fiction. More specifically, it aims to answer the following question: in what ways is nostalgia interwoven in the narrative of the studied works of detective fiction? To what extent does the genre conventions of detective fiction produce different ways of relating to the past compared to existing notions and conceptions of nostalgia? To answer these questions, I explore the ‘tendencies’ (to use Boym’s term)1 of reconstructive and preservative nostalgias present in four

1 Boym uses the word “tendencies” to show that her restorative and reflective nostalgia are “not absolute types, but rather, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing” (41). Similarly, I use the term to highlight that the Gravemaker 11 work of detective fiction drawing from both literature and television. Analyzing the workings of reconstructive nostalgia, I use Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), where ‘amateur’ detective Smilla investigates the murder of Isaiah, a young Inuit boy who lived in the same apartment building. During her investigation, Smilla occasionally delves into her own traumatic childhood as a young Inuit girl moving to Denmark after her mother went missing. Secondly, I refer to Jane Campion’s television series Top of the Lake (2013) where we follow detective Robin Griffin who investigates the rape and later disappearance of twelve-year-old Tui Mitcham while struggling with her own teenage sexual trauma. For the analysis of preservative nostalgia, I turn to Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000) which takes place in Shanghai and London in the 1930s and revolves around private Detective Christopher Banks whose parents went missing when he was still a boy living in Shanghai. He returns to China, entirely convinced that he will recover them. And lastly, I use Abi Morgan’s television series River (2015) which tells the story of Detective Inspector John River who investigates the murder of his colleague Detective Sergeant Jackie Stevenson (‘Stevie’). These works will support my claim for introducing reconstructive and preservative nostalgia as a new vocabulary for analyzing nostalgia in detective fiction. I have chosen two novels and two television series so that my argument for the presence of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia in detective fiction is as expansive and inclusive as possible. Namely, when making an argument for the introduction of two new ‘languages’ to talk about nostalgia in detective fiction, a genre that includes novels as well as films and television series, it is important to refer to different media. Additionally, there are differences in the representation of nostalgia in detective novels and series which are worthwhile to reflect on. For instance, in film and television, nostalgia can be evoked through paradisal images or costumes, décor, music, etc. that hint at a lost time, while novels can only use language to express a longing for the past. However, it must be established that this thesis is not a comparative analysis of the representation of nostalgia in novels and television series of detective fiction – indeed, it mainly focuses on the textual aspects of both media, and only occasionally refers to other non-textual representations. Yet, because both detective novels and series are so immensely popular and large in number, using two different media as case studies

longing expressed in the discussed works of detective fiction are not “absolute” expressions of either reconstructive or preservative nostalgia but that the longing may also contain elements of both types. In other words, even though I have divided the four works of detective fiction between reconstructive and preservative nostalgia, the works might also display a longing that is found in the other types of nostalgia. Gravemaker 12 makes a stronger case for the introduction of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia as new narratives of nostalgia present in detective fiction than resorting to only one type of media. I have picked these works of detective fiction based on two criteria. Firstly, I have searched for works that contain a ‘dual investigation’, or feature a detective who experiences the crime that they are investigating as “a mirroring of their own victimization” (Thornham 2). By this, I mean that the crime, to some extent, reflects the trauma of their own past through which the detective becomes progressively involved in the narrative of the crime to the point where they ultimately discover their own central role in the case, and that, as Zizek writes, the “final outcome is that [the detective] [themselves] was from the very beginning implicated in the object of [their] quest” (200). The story thus contains a dual investigation: one that revolves around finding the truth behind a crime, and another whose investigative object is essentially the detective him/herself. I have picked this criteria because, as I argue in Chapter 2 discussing Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and Top of the Lake, in this dual investigation the detective’s reconstructive nostalgia can flourish. That is, in placing themselves and their traumatic past in the center of their investigation, the goal of Smilla and Robin’s detective work is not only to solve the crime but also to reconstruct a lost sense of intimacy with the world that they had lost due to their own unresolved trauma. For Smilla and Robin, the crime thus becomes the arena for their reconstructive nostalgia, or their longing to reconstruct a home and a sense of belonging. The second criteria is that the detective had to be either physically and/ or mentally ‘displaced’, i.e. either being physically removed from their homeland, or had to have a general feeling of not-belonging which the detectives. The reason for setting up this criteria is that this loss of a home and sentiments of “not feeling at home” are characteristic of the experience of the nostalgic (Boym 251). This lamentation for the loss of the home might result in the desire to reconstruct a new one, as I show in Chapter 2. However, this loss of belonging might also result in the melancholic lingering around the ruins of the lost home which is characteristic for the preservative nostalgic. Discussing When We Were Orhpans and River, Chapter 3 demonstrates that Banks’s and River’s relationship with the traumatic past is not, like in Smilla and Lake, defined by a desire to make sense of it and thereby reconstruct a new home where they can feel at home, but rather by a melancholic unwillingness to let go of their idealized notion of that home. The performance of the detective, i.e. the investigative tasks of the detective, allows Banks and River to maintain a melancholic relationship with their idealized notion of the past. In this detective performance, through which they preserve the romantic images of the lost home, lies their preservative nostalgia. Gravemaker 13

Ultimately, I claim that the current language and conceptualization of nostalgia, as outlined by Boym and Stewart, do not fit the genre conventions and narrative of detective fiction. Instead, or rather in addition to the existing notions of nostalgia, we need to expand our vocabulary of nostalgia when discussing detective fiction, and reconstructive and preservative nostalgia enable us to fully study the longing for the past in detective fiction.

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Chapter 1 Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: An Explanation

In this chapter, I provide an explanation of reconstructive nostalgia and preservative nostalgia, which I argue to be two forms of nostalgia that are depict the longing for the past in detective fiction more adequately. I start with a brief explanation of Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia. Then I move on to explaining the workings of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia. In these explanations, I refer to Boym’s nostalgias in order to explain how reconstructive and preservative nostalgia are different. For both, I have also included a small case study that show how both nostalgias operate and how they work with the genre conventions and narrative of detective fiction.

Boym’s Restorative Nostalgia and Reflective Nostalgia Boym defines two types of nostalgias: restorative and reflective nostalgia. Nostalgia of the former type is defined by the emphasis on the nostos, the return to a lost home. Building on conspiracy theories, restorative nostalgia is driven by the narrative that the homeland is forever under siege by a mythical enemy, a “them” that has invaded the home and endangers the values and traditions of the community. The restorative nostalgic believes that the home is still within reach and that it can be retrieved through the persecution of a mythical enemy. Crucially, it doesn’t consider itself as nostalgic but “believe[s] that [its] project is about truth” (41). In this, Boym believes restorative nostalgia to be “characteristic of the most extreme cases of Gravemaker 15 contemporary nationalism fed on right-wing popular culture” (43). Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is more focused on the algia, the pain that derives from the acceptance of the irrevocability of the past. Whereas restorative nostalgia produces a collective discourse around a prelapsarian moment that must be restored, reflective nostalgia is oriented towards the individual who revels in cultural memory, and “perpetually defer[s] homecoming itself” (49). The object is not to the return to a lost past, but to reflect the irretrievability of the past which offers a space for historical contemplation; it offers a “multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historical development” (50). In this, reflective nostalgia can be ironic and humorous, and a site for creating multiple narratives, rather than producing one dominant plot as an oppressive homogenizing force, as is the case with restorative nostalgia. Though restorative and reflective nostalgia are very useful concepts for analyzing sentiments of nostalgia, these two notions of nostalgia, as outlined by Boym, do not accurately depict the experiences of nostalgia that is present in the detective works I will analyze for this thesis. True, the restorative nostalgic’s wish to return to a lost, utopian home seems to reflect the detective’s pursuit to restore a former status quo by solving the crime and catching the criminal. However, since this kind of nostalgia “characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths” (Boym 41), it is too political and too much concerned with collective memory for the purposes of this thesis. Instead, as mentioned in the introduction, I move away from the analysis of nostalgia in a socio-political context and instead focus on nostalgic sentiments in relation to individual memory, and see how the genre is employed to fulfill its characters personal nostalgic desires. Furthermore, reflective nostalgia’s celebration of the multiplicity of narratives around the past goes against detective fiction’s pursuit of the “the Truth” behind the mystery of a crime. For these reasons, both restorative and reflective nostalgia do not suffice as a conceptual framework for the goals of this thesis. Instead, I propose two new types of nostalgia – reconstructive nostalgia and preservative nostalgia – which characterize the ways of relating to the past in detective fiction more accurately.

Reconstructive Nostalgia: Trauma and Homebuilding For the reconstructive nostalgic, the past is incomplete and fragmented through which they experience a sense of loss and displacement. This fragmentation and consequent feeling of not “being at home” in the world is often caused by a past trauma, and the nostalgic tries to solve or cure these sentiments of displacement by constantly revisiting the past in order to reconstruct a narrative that can make the trauma, which is, as Cathy Caruth defines it, “the Gravemaker 16 enigma of a human agent’s repeated and unknowing acts” (2), comprehensible. In relation to detective fiction, there are many works – especially the ones used in this thesis – that contain a crime that serves as a mirroring or substitute of the detective’s own trauma, which engender its reconstructive nostalgic tendencies. That is, the reconstruction of the narrative around the present crime serves as a coping mechanism to, vicariously, ‘deal with’ the nostalgic’s or detective’s own traumatic past, thereby creating a sense of unity and closure in the present. Though there is no guarantee that the detective’s own trauma will be cured through the solution to the present crime – indeed, this seems hardly ever to be the case – the detective is nonetheless driven by a firm need to solve the crime that mirrors their own trauma. The reconstructive nostalgic’s desire for the past is, then, a form of nostalgia that takes the concept back to its original meaning: homesickness. That is to say, experiencing displacement due to the effects of trauma, the reconstructive nostalgic longs to feel “at home” in the world again. The past which they long for is not a “real” or clearly defined moment or place but rather a vague moment before these sentiments of homesickness came into being. I refer again to Boym who writes,

“[t]o feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you; it is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on the actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia” (Boym 251).

Similarly, the desired past for the reconstructive nostalgic is imaginary: it is a longing for a before, before a traumatic event, a moment in the past in which the world was unified and unperturbed, and where they felt at home. It must be established, however, that this nostalgic relation to the past is a matter of reconstruction rather than restoration: it does not revolve around the exact restoration of a previous state of affairs but rather around reconstructing something (new) out of already existing components. Particularly in the context of detective fiction, a return to a previous moment before the trauma is virtually impossible since one cannot undo the events of the crime: the dead cannot be resurrected and past physical or sexual assaults cannot be undone. The reconstructive nostalgic’s longing, then, is not characterized by a longing for a moment to return. Instead, the past functions as what Verhoeff calls “an investment of the past in the present” (117), thus a longing for the past that attempts to deal with a homesickness experienced in the present. Gravemaker 17

Reconstructive nostalgia is therefore as much about the reconstruction of the past as it is about the construction of a possible future, a future which is initially denied to the nostalgic because of the trauma. Unlike Boym’s restorative nostalgic, the reconstructive nostalgic does not desire or believe in a return of the past but they probe the past which they believe to hold the key to ‘solving’ or ‘dealing with’ the aftermath of a past trauma or loss. Their longing for the past is thus characterized by a desire to solve sentiments of not-belonging, and to, essentially, build or reconstruct a (new) home. Reconstructive nostalgia is, then, a matter of homebuilding rather than homecoming: whereas ‘homecoming’ presupposes the existence of a home that might be lost but can be retrieved and restored again (as is the case with restorative nostalgia), reconstructive nostalgia’s interest in ‘homebuilding’ recognizes the complete loss and the impossibility of the retrieval of a lost home. In other words, the reconstructive nostalgic longs to regain the sentiments of ‘feeling at home again’ but they do not believe in the restoration of the original home. Instead, they find their salvation in the reconstruction of a new one. Rust Cohle from Nic Pizolatto’s television series True Detective displays reconstructive nostalgic tendencies. The series follow Louisiana State Detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cole (Matthew McConaughey) in their pursuit of a serial killer who performs the ritualistic killings of several prostitutes over a 17-year period. The killer also turns out to be involved in the abduction and sexual abuse of children attending religious schools that are set up by the state governor Tuttle’s family which turns Hart and Cohle’s investigation into the pursuit of state authorities. Apart from the serial killings, the series also revolve around the lives of its detectives, and in this oscillation between the crime investigation and the detectives’ psychology, particularly Cohle’s, the series reconstructive nostalgia comes to the surface. The trauma of the loss of his infant daughter who was killed in a car accident, and a consequently failed marriage has left Cohle depressed and disorientated. Bonner characterized him as being “prone to visions and lengthy, misanthropic monologues” and “in danger of falling off the rails” (Bonner 100). Indeed, believing that “we are things that labour under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when, in fact, everybody’s nobody” (“The Long Bright Dark”), Cohle displays relentless abhorrence for any kind of narrative – especially of the Christian kind – that offers, as he sees it, the illusion of a self-conscious and meaningful existence. Observing an evangelist reverend, he muses that the sermon is a “transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. [The reverend] absorbs their dread with his narrative. Gravemaker 18

Because of this, he’s effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain, dulls critical thinking” (“Seeing Things”). His philosophical pessimism shows signs of underlying sentiments of displacement. That is, rejecting any kind of narrative that offers stability or reassurance for one’s existence, Cohle’s life is defined by a voluntary state of displacement and sense of belonging. Stating that “past a certain age, a man can without a family can be a bad thing” (“The Long Bright Dark”), and that once he saw Cohle’s nearly empty house “he started to feel real sorry for him” (“The Long Bright Dark”), Hart reverberates Cohle’s incapability to feel at home in the world. Picking up the investigation of the serial killings seventeen years later, the crime provides for Cohle the opportunity to leave behind his existential displacement and to reconstruct a new sense of belonging. In this desire to rebuild a new home, a new sense of belonging by resorting to the past (the crime), Cohle’s reconstructive nostalgic tendencies becomes visible. When Hart asks why he came back to Louisiana after all those years, Cohle answers that there is “something I had to see to. Before getting on with something else. My life’s been a circle of violence and degradation for as long as I can remember. I’m ready to tie it off” (“After You’ve Gone”). The fact, then, that Cohle is “ready to tie it off” seems to suggest a desire to move away from previous disturbances and to move on, supposedly rebuilding a sense of feeling at home again in the world through solving the crime. Indeed, during his recovery after the final confrontation with the serial killer, thereby finally closing the case, Cohle shows a regenerated sense of belonging in the world. Standing outside at night, he tells Hart about his dreamlike visions while recovering in the hospital. He says that he saw his daughter and his father waiting for him, and that he was overcome with a feeling of warmth and that “it was like I was part of everything that I ever loved” (“Form and Void”). Even though he then disappeared and saw them fading away, Cohle could still “feel her love there. Even more than before. Nothing but that love” (“Form and Void”). As he further philosophizes, there is just one story, “the oldest: light versus dark” (“Form and Void”). Looking at the night sky, Hart says that he believes the dark has a lot more territory. Later, Cohle contradicts him saying, “you’re looking at it wrong (…). Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light is winning” (“Form and Void”). With his focus on the winning light, a symbol of goodness, purity, and safety, Cohle shows a regenerated sense of belonging. Cohle’s recapturing of his lost love and sense of belonging is, then, a matter of homebuilding rather than homecoming: he does not return to home, his daughter and his father, but instead reconstructs a new one.

Gravemaker 19

Preservative Nostalgia: The Safeguarding of Home While the reconstructive nostalgic wishes to construct a narrative that is absent, the preservative nostalgic already has constructed a narrative of the past which they to want to be preserved. Preservative nostalgia is a desire to maintain a certain imagined version of the past, which they feel to be under threat or prone to be forgotten. Like the reconstructive nostalgic, the preservative nostalgic doesn’t desire or believe in the return of the past but wants to hold onto a version of the past as they know it or are comfortable with, fearing fragmentation or loss of their idealized image. In relation to detective fiction, the preservative nostalgic detective believes that a certain version of the past demands or needs to be remembered. This remembering is done through the investigation and the search of the story of the crime which can be understood as a way of archiving, or preserving, a particular version of the past. However, the detective genre’s reliance on the existence of the “Real” and the “Truth” inevitably clashes with the detective’s idealized image of the past, which often forms the main conflict and motif of the narrative. Preservative nostalgia contains elements of restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia but is also intrinsically different from both. In its insistence on the safeguarding of their own narrative of the past, the preservative nostalgic’s relationship to the past is similar to the restorative nostalgic’s rejection of thinking of themselves as nostalgic, and their belief that “their project is about truth” (Boym 41). Namely, the preservative nostalgic’s battle to maintain their version of the past which they believe to be ‘in danger’ reverberates with the restorative nostalgic’s struggle with “[a]mbivalence, the complexity of history and the specificity of modern circumstances” (Boym 43). Both nostalgics thus tend to cling on to their own version of the past: any other notions of the past are rejected, or, as Boym writes, “erased” (43). Yet, preservative nostalgia is different from reconstructive nostalgia in its relation to the home: whereas the latter “proposes to rebuild the lost home” (Boym 41), the preservative nostalgic’s relation to the home is not motivated by the desire to rebuild it but rather to leave their memory and idealized image of it intact, and to conserve and to defend that image like a monument or a relic. This focus on the preservation of an idealized image of the past, in turn, touches upon the conceptual grounds of reflective nostalgia which also considers the past as “a perfect snapshot” and not as something that should “reveal any signs of decay; it has to be freshly painted in its ‘original image’ and remain eternally young” (Boym 49). Both nostalgias, then, revolve around the safeguarding of an idealized image of the past. However, the difference between preservative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia lies in their attitude towards the existence of Gravemaker 20 multiple narratives of the past. The latter, as Boym states, involves a nostalgic narrative that is “ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary” and that “opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historical development” (Boym 50). In other words, its nostalgic narrative is never conclusive, final, and absolute but always fluctuating and incomplete. Having the capacity to “awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (Boym 50), reflective nostalgia celebrates the existence of multiple stories of the past. In contrast, preservative nostalgia very much laments the presence of other stories and narratives that come into conflict with their own notion of the past. Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight illustrates the workings and characteristics of preservative nostalgia in detective fiction. The novel revolves around V. who goes on a quest to uncover the secrets of his half-brother, the famous author Sebastian Knight. Though the form of the novel is the fictional biography about Sebastian Knight written by V., it has also incorporated various elements from detective fiction, employing and referring to cliché’s, tropes and detective icons on multiple occasions. For example, V. mentions using “an old Sherlock Holmes stratagem” (176) when questioning a ‘witness’, and when talking to an old friend of Sebastian, V. notes that there was a “sudden voice in the mist” who said “Sebastian Knight? (…) Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?” (56), as if coming from a “well-oiled novel” (57). V. has written the biography in response to Tragedy of Sebastian Knight by Sebastian’s secretary Mr. Goodman who, according to V., “paints in a few ill-chosen sentences a ridiculously wrong picture of Sebastian Knight’s childhood” (13). In V’s motivation to write a biography about his brother, thereby constructing a narrative which he believes to be the “Real” and “True” depiction of the past, the novel’s preservative nostalgia becomes evident. Moreover, the novel’s employment of the detective genre as well as the biography genre emphasizes its preservative nostalgic tendencies. That is, V.’s detective-like pursuit of his biographical subject is essentially persuaded by a nostalgic longing for the preservation of his idealized notion of the past. Reflecting on his research, V. notes that most of his biography relies on his identification with Sebastian: “[I would have to] bring up his life bit by bit and solde[r] the fragments with my inner knowledge of his character. Inner knowledge? Yes, this was the thing I possessed, I felt it in every nerve” (Nabokov 34-35). V.’s reliance on his supposedly “inner knowledge” of Sebastian seems to suggest an already constructed narrative of Sebastian and his past. This turns V’s biography into a preservative nostalgic act, a crystallization and conservation of a prefabricated and preferred notion of the past. Because V.’s quest is motivated by his preservative nostalgic desire, the actual ‘factual’ reconstruction of the real life of Sebastian Knight becomes secondary. That is, V. does not look for facts but Gravemaker 21 for ways to satisfy his nostalgic desire for Sebastian. This is especially evident in the following passage:

“my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had gradually grown into a dream, that quest, using the patterns of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognize that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian’s life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements” (157).

His description of his search having its own “magic” and being “dream” seems to display his nostalgia, his idealization of the past: V.’s quest for biographical knowledge of Sebastian has superseded ‘normal’ logic and has “developed its own magic and logic”. This shows that his quest does not follow rational laws, and that his search for Sebastian seems to be driven by romantic poetics rather than a desire to find the absolute scientific truth. In other words, instead of being led by rationality, V. is led by Sebastian’s “ghostly tracks” (189), or his preservative nostalgic desire for him. And so, longing to preserve his romanticized idea of Sebastian, V.’s shows tendency to reject any narratives that contrast with his own. Discovering Sebastian’s last mistress, V. can hardly hide his disappointment that she, a flirty party girl who “you may find in any cheap novel” (168), and who “got rather on my nerves” (193), was one of the last people having such close contact with Sebastian, one of the most remarkable writers of his time (“What was the use of asking! Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind” (200)). Thus the fact that V. refuses to accept this alternative story of Sebastian’s past reveals that his search is essentially fueled by preservative nostalgia or the desire for his version of Sebastian’s life to be conserved.

Conclusion Reconstructive and preservative nostalgia provide new and additional narratives of relating to and longing for the past in detective fiction. While the former uses the crime story to regenerate a sense of belonging in the world that had been lost through trauma, for the latter, the crime story gives the opportunity to safeguard, or as I argue in chapter 3, perform a version of the past as they wish it to be remembered. Having explained the characteristics and workings of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia, I move on to the larger case studies in chapter 2 and 3. Apart from providing a longer and more detailed analysis of the presence of these nostalgias in detective fiction, these case studies also show how nostalgia works with other concepts such as trauma, melancholia, and performance. Ultimately, through the case studies Gravemaker 22 in chapter 2 and 3 I make a case for the introduction of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia as two new nostalgias in detective fiction.

Gravemaker 23

Chapter 2 Traumatized Detectives: Reconstructive Nostalgia, the Figure of the Child, and the Struggle of Homebuilding

This chapter explores the presence and workings of reconstructive nostalgia in Peter Hoeg’s novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and Jane Campion’s television series Top of the Lake2. I argue that these two works of detective fiction display a longing for the past that is motivated by the belief that the past holds the key for solving the sentiments of un-belonging experienced in the present caused by a past trauma. For the detectives in Smilla and Lake, solving the crime becomes a way to vicariously solve their feelings of displacement. The crime therefore offers a liberating rupture from the detectives’ crippling sense of displacement due to aftermath of their trauma. I claim that reconstructive nostalgia is incorporated in the narrative of Smilla and Lake, since in investigating the crime, the detectives resort to the past not only in order to offer a solution to the crime but also to attempt to deal with the problem of not feeling at home experienced in the present. In other words, the world of the detective is fragmented through the devastating effects of a traumatic event, and the reconstructive aspect of their detective work – i.e. offering a narrative to the unknown story of the crime – offers the opportunity to reconstruct a world that was hitherto dislodged. For the detectives, the investigation provides the opportunity to break from a present traumatic displacement, and to

2 In this chapter I will refer to both works as, respectively, Smilla and Lake Gravemaker 24 reconstruct a lost sense of “being at home” in the world. In this belief in the healing powers of the past, the detectives’ show a Janus-faced form of nostalgia that looks at the past in order to accomplish something in the present and the future. Smilla and Lake express sentiments of reconstructive nostalgia not only through the genre conventions of the detective narrative but also through the figure of the child. The child embodies a connection between the past and the future: on the one hand, it is a figure on which the detectives can channel their nostalgic feelings for the prelapsarian moment before the disrupting events of the trauma, while on the other hand the child personifies the prophetic promise of bringing about a better life in the future. Being a figure that incites a longing for the past and at the same time holds the promise of a better future, the child becomes a site of reconstructive nostalgia since it represents the hope for a future away from the problems and agony experienced in the present. In Lake and Smilla the figure of the child is employed to reconstruct a “home” that was lost due to the events of the crime and the detectives’ own trauma. In analyzing the reconstructive nostalgic tendencies of Smilla and Lake, I focus on the following questions: How are trauma and nostalgia incorporated in the narrative Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and Top of the Lake, and how are these two concepts interrelated? What is the role of detective fiction and the figure of the child in reconstructive nostalgia?

Mirroring Traumas Both Smilla and Lake present their detectives as suffering from a past trauma which becomes the detectives’ main drive behind investigating the crime since it bears some similarities to their trauma. This is not unique: many works of detective fiction have a detective who is portrayed as a rather sad and depressed character, frequently suffering from chronic existential angst caused by a past trauma or a regular inability to depart from a certain loss, and, instead, completely absorb themselves in their investigative work. To name a few examples, there is Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander who is “careworn and rumpled (…) gloomy, troubled and ambivalent about his father” (The Economist); Robert Galbraith’s private detective Cormoran Strike is an ex Royal Military Police officer who lost his half of his right leg in an attack in Afghanistan, an attack which left him “wounded both physically and psychologically – and his life is in disarray” (Galbraith); and even Edgar Allen Poe’s Auguste Dupin is noted to have fallen victim to a sorrowful existence, having been “reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it” (Poe, “Murders of Rue Morgue”). Gravemaker 25

In Smilla and Lake the crime constitutes a mirroring of the detectives’ own trauma, suggesting that by investigating the crime, they are vicariously also looking into their trauma. In this mirroring lies the reconstructive nostalgic tendencies of both works: the detectives resort to the past (the crime) and, vicariously, the events that led to their trauma, in order to “solve” a present disturbance or experiences of displacement. Smilla’s detective, Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen, the daughter of an Inuit female hunter and a rich Danish doctor, suffers from the trauma of the missing of her mother and her consequent forced move from Greenland to Kopenhagen. As a result of this trauma, Smilla’s life is defined by exile and sentiments of un- belonging. Smilla never learned to adapt to the Danish way of living: she was kicked off from several schools and shows throughout the novel a violent and distrustful attitude towards the Danes. Moreover, the fact that she lives in the ‘White Cells’, a housing complex that consists of “prefabricated boxes of white concrete”, inhabited by “those living a more marginal existence” which turns the nickname into “something of a sick joke to those of us who live here” (Høeg 5), symbolizes the fact that Smilla lives both in body and soul on the fringes of Danish society. Also living in the White Cells is Isaiah, a fellow Greenlander and the child of an alcoholic mother and a deceased father, with whom Smilla has built an intimate mother-son- like friendship. The novel starts with Isaiah’s funeral who, so the story goes, found his death when he accidentally fell from the roof while playing. Deducing from Isaiah’s footsteps into the snow, Smilla, however, believes that Isaiah was chased to his death by which the accident becomes a murder case. As a ‘detective’, Smilla investigates the crime and stumbles upon decades-old conspiracies around scientific arctic expeditions on Gela Alta, an isolated glaciated island off Greenland. Her research finally leads her to a voyage on an icebreaker ship heading to the coast of Greenland. There she comes eye to eye with Isaiah’s murder, scientist Tørk Hvidd, whom she eventually chases out onto the frozen sea. Tørk tries to return to the ship but is disoriented in the dark and stormy weather. Using her instinct for snow and ice, Smilla forces him away from the ship, leading him further into the cold and icy landscape, and to both their deaths. From the novel it becomes apparent that Smilla’s unyielding pursuit of the truth behind Isaiah’s death has its roots in the trauma of the disappearance of her mother and her forced exile from Greenland. In this, the investigation of the Isaiah’s murder provides a moment of reflection on her own trauma. Throughout the novel, Smilla experiences flashbacks to her own childhood, to the moments before and after she felt displaced due to the events of her trauma. These flashbacks often come up by association, generally appearing during her investigation of the crime or when thinking of Isaiah. For instance, recalling a memory of when Isaiah got a bike Gravemaker 26 and learned to ride it, she notes that they “found him ten kilometres away on Old Køge Highway, on training wheels with a lunchbox on a carrier. On his way to Greenland” (Høeg 55). She then compares this memory to her own desire to return to Greenland: “[f]rom the age of seven, when I came to Denmark for the first time, until I was thirteen and gave up, I ran away more times than I can remember” (55). This comparison between herself and the subject of the crime that she is investigating therefore suggests that Smilla is not only investigating a murder case but is also looking into her own psyche. In providing the opportunity to investigate her own trauma, the crime offers the promise of bringing about a moment of liberation from her damaging preoccupation with the past. As she asserts, “Isaiah’s death is an irregularity, an eruption that produces fissure. That fissure has set me free. For a brief time, and I can’t explain how, I have been set into motion” (205). Thus for Smilla, the crime brings about a potential emancipatory moment of liberation from her obsession with the past. Norseng likewise claims that constant reflection on her traumatic past play a central role in Smilla’s investigation of the crime: “[Smilla’s] failure to uncover Isaiah’s murderer and hence to recover Isaiah, is deeply anchored in the past, in her attempts to return to Greenland, both in body and spirit, to the home of her mother (…). Smilla’s search for Isaiah can be interpreted as a repetition of a “life-long”, if disguised search for her lost mother” (Norseng 64-65). The novel, then, suggests that her search for Isaiah’s murderer provides a moment in which Smilla’s feelings of displacement due to the traumatic disappearance of her mother and the exile of her homeland can be scrutinized and potentially cured. Lake also revolves around the dealings of the trauma of the crime while exploring the psychological aftermath of a trauma experienced by the detective herself. That is, for detective Robin Griffin (Elizabeth Moss) the investigation of the crime, which has great similarities with her own trauma, opens up some past wounds, offering Robin, like in Smilla, the opportunity to look into her own traumatic past. The Sidney detective returns to her childhood town Laketop in New Zealand to visit her terminally sick mother. Specialized in cases involving children, Robin is soon asked by the local police to help them with the investigation of the pregnancy and the later disappearance of twelve-year-old Tui Mitchum (Jacqueline Joe), which is treated as a case of suspected child abuse and rape since Tui is only a minor. Being a victim of a gang rape at the age of fifteen herself, of which its perpetrators were never punished and continued to live an undisturbed life in Laketop, it soon becomes clear that Robin still suffers from this unresolved trauma. The investigation around the case of Tui, also a victim of child rape which took place in the same environment as Robin’s, is thus essentially a recurrence of her own trauma. In this, Robin enters, as Thornham argues, “a terrible place and finds there a horrific Gravemaker 27 mirroring of her own victimization” (2), thereby becoming the object of her investigation. Eventually, the series reveal that Tui’s pregnancy was the result of the incestual rape committed by her father, Matt Mitchum (Peter Mullan), who Tui shoots dead at the end of the series when he threatens to hurt her baby. During her investigation of Tui, Robin also discovers that Laketop’s detective sergeant, Al Parker (David Wenham), has been prostituting young boys and girls that took part in a barista trainee program for disadvantaged youth. This mirroring of Robin’s trauma runs throughout the series. In her frantic search for the truth behind the crime, Robin has an almost spiritual connection with Tui, turning Robin’s investigation into a quest for self-healing. In “Searcher’s Search” we see Robin walking into the lake almost exactly like Tui did at the beginning of the first episode. While Tui goes underwater and shows her pain and anguish by clenching her fists, Robin stops halfway, clearly disturbed by the thought of Tui and probably by the memory of her own rape. Rather than going underwater, Robin rushes back to shore, symbolizing her inability to face her own trauma, and highlighting her emotional and personal connection to Tui and the case – a connection that is materialized by the eventual discovery that Matt Mitchum is Robin’s biological father, making Tui her half-sister by blood. Johnno, Tui’s half-brother and Robin’s boyfriend3, further confirms this tie between Robin and Tui in the final episode. Trying to comfort Robin who is worried when Tui goes away with some friends, he says, “You’re apart from Tui again. It feels traumatic – it’s not surprising” (“No Goodbyes, Thanks”). With the crimes mirroring the detectives’ own trauma, the detective genre becomes in Smilla and Lake a platform where traumatic experiences are narratively represented and explored.

Detective Fiction and the Case of Trauma When comparing the characteristics and symptoms of trauma with the cultural and genre conventions of detective fiction it becomes evident that there are many similarities. These similarities do not only lie in the fact that detective fiction inevitably involves a certain form of trauma (murder, abduction, assault, etc.) but also in how it, as a genre, revolves around matters of the (in)comprehension, repression, and repetition of a violent or devastating event which is similar to the conceptualization of trauma as outlined by scholars in trauma studies. Cathy Caruth, one of the leading figures in trauma studies, depicts trauma as an issue of the inability of apprehension. She argues that the manifestation of trauma in the individual does not solely

3 This would make Robin and Johnno’s relationship an incestual one but a DNA test later revealed that Matt Mitchum was not Johnno’s biological father. Gravemaker 28 rely on the violence or horror of the event that caused the trauma, but rather on the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. She describes trauma as the “unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (2). The main characteristic of trauma is that it is not fully known and “not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (Unclaimed Experiences Caruth 4). Thus the nature of trauma lies in the fact that it is not known in the first place and so “returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Unclaimed Experiences Caruth 4). This problem of knowing and understanding is also one of the underlying issues of detective fiction. Placing the classic detective story in the context of narrativity, semiotics, and reading, Peter Hühn discusses the elements of detective fiction within the context of to sign-interpretation, meaning-formation, and story-telling. He defines the crime as “an uninterpretable sign, that is, one that resists integration into the established meaning-system of the community” (453-54). In this, the crime has the effect of transforming the world into a conglomeration of potential signs that are suspected of being a “clue” that can lead the detective to the solution to the mystery of the crime. As he claims, “the enigma of the murder endows the everyday world with a rich potentiality of unsuspected meanings” (Hühn 455). And so, all phenomena lose their usual, automatically ascribed meanings and signify something else, resulting in the traumatic inability of understanding. Here, the crime in detective fiction is akin to Caruth’s depiction of trauma, who claims that the disturbing effects of trauma do not only lie in its violent nature but, above all, in the fact that it creates a state in which simple comprehension is (for a moment) resisted. The depiction of the crime as an uninterpretable sign that causes a disruption in meaning and understanding is also present in Lake. That is, the series portray a world that, for the detective, has become disturbed in terms of apprehension through the effects of the crime. Throughout the series we witness how Robin’s world is composed of signs that hint at having hidden and unknown meanings. During the police interview with Robin in the first episode, Tui answers Robin’s question about who had sexually assaulted her with “No One”, a statement that is so puzzling and “strange” that it demands to be interpreted and deciphered beyond its literal meaning: is it a sign of not-knowing, an Odyssean use of the word “nobody”, or does it mean “not one but multiple”? The ambiguity of signs is further emphasized by Robin’s gaze, the visual representation of her tendency to look excessively at people and her environments while constantly interpreting and reflecting, which Thornham analyses within the context of the “misogynist gaze of the male police officers at Tui, and [the insistence] on Robin’s own authority” (9). Robin’s gaze can also be placed within the context of the crisis of the sign. Searching for clues, and looking, for instance, beyond the site of Zanic’s hanging and Gravemaker 29 discovering that he did not commit suicide but was in fact killed, Robin detects, observes, and scrutinizes her environment excessively which emphasizes how destabilized Robin’s world is in terms of meaning, and how it compels her to approach it with constant close inspection. As Robin’s colleague, detective Al Parker observes, “Sometimes in your career there comes along a case that fits so tightly that you can’t let go. That’s where things start to go crazy. You dream about it and can’t stop thinking about it. Everything around starts to be a sign. (…) I think that Tui’s case is triggering history in your life” (“The Edge of the Universe”, emphasis added). And so here, Al echoes Hühn’s characterization of the crime that has the effect of transforming the world into a conglomeration of potential signs4. Thus, Lake characterizes the crime as causing a traumatic disturbance and dislodging, not only of the (ideological) status quo but also of the validity of a system of meaning that overflows the world with a mishmash of Straussian floating signifiers, resulting in a world that resists direct apprehension. Following Caruth’s depiction of trauma as an incomprehensible event, detective fiction can, then, be understood as a genre that takes trauma as its narrative problem, since it essentially revolves around the process of making something that is unknown known by providing a solution to the mystery of the crime. That is, the discovery of the truth behind the murder mystery can become a way that potentially makes the trauma interpretable for the mind of the individual, and thereby solves its devastating impact. In this, the detective is, essentially, a bringer of stability and uniformity in meaning to a world that has become terrorized by ambiguity due to the disruptive effects of the crime. The task of the detective is after all, as Hühn claims, a matter of delimitating the array of potential meanings of the crime “by separating the relevant signs from the mass of nonrelevant facts around it, until [they] are finally able to reduce the polyvalence to the one true meaning, the true story of the crime” (Hühn 455). This search for finding a way in which the uninterpretable event of the crime can be reintegrated into existing notions of reality reverberates with Caruth who, likewise, claims that trauma requires narrative integration “both for the sake of testimony and for the sake of cure” (Explorations in Memory 153). In characterizing the search for the solution and meaning of the crime as a practice of “reintegrating the sign” and thereby “to defuse it” (Hühn 454, emphasis added), the detective’s investigation becomes a trauma-lifting quest: in revolving around finding a stable ground and fixedness in meaning in a world that is destabilized by the traumatic

4 Smilla similarly portrays a world full with clues that signify something else than they initially seemed to refer to, illustrated by Isaiah’s footsteps in the snow – a classic detective clue – from which Smilla was able to decipher that rather than an accident, they signified murder. Gravemaker 30 effects of the crime, detective fiction is a genre that takes the resolution of trauma as its narrative goal and purpose. The detective’s goal to restore stability in meaning in a world that has been disturbed due to the effects of trauma reveal its nostalgic sentiments, since it constitutes a longing for a prelapsarian moment, a moment in the past before the world became infected with an experienced loss and feelings of displacement. Understanding trauma in terms of a perceived crisis in meaning and apprehension, then, provides the crucial link between trauma and nostalgia found in detective fiction that I argue to be typical for reconstructive nostalgia. In her conceptualization of nostalgia, Stewart also depicts nostalgia as a desire for a perceived lack of understanding and unity experienced in the present. She claims that the past which the nostalgic longs for is a moment where the world is believed to have enjoyed stability in meaning. Stewart’s nostalgic laments what she identifies as “the crisis of the sign” or “the gap between the signifier and the signified” (Stewart 17). She asserts that the nostalgic longs for a lost point of origin, a moment that still contained complete and totalized understanding, “the point before the splitting of the signifier and the signified” (Stewart 19). The desire of the nostalgic is to fix a perceived crisis of meaning and to return to a world where “lived and mediated experience are one, where authenticity and transcendence are both present and everywhere” (23). In this longing for a moment before the break of meaning and experience, resulting in arbitrariness and displacement, we can recognize the symptoms of trauma. That is, in a similar way, the nostalgic’s lament for the crisis of the sign, a loss of meaning, describes the suffering of the traumatic. Thus, Stewart’s conceptualization of nostalgia, understanding it as a “crisis of the sign”, illustrate the conditions of reconstructive nostalgia: in making the crime comprehensible by reconstructing a narrative – a story around the crime with a setting, motif, and murderer – and thereby attempting to solve a present trauma, the detective resorts to the past in order to “resolve” a present disturbance.

The Child: A Figure of Reconstructive Nostalgia In Smilla and Lake the figure child represents lost point of origin, a state before the crisis of the sign, as illustrated by Stewart. Embodying a pure version of the world, the figure of the child holds for both detective Smilla and Robin the promise of reconstructing the lost sentiment of being “at home” in the world. In both works, the crime revolves around the child, and this violation of the child, a figure of innocence and purity, becomes a metaphor for the world that has, similarly, been disrupted and robbed from its stability in meaning due to the traumatic events of the crime. In other words, the violated child is the personification of a world dislodged Gravemaker 31 due to the crisis of the sign. In turn, as becomes evident from Smilla and Lake, the saving of the child, i.e. the returning or avenging of its lost innocence, becomes a way of simultaneously reintroducing a similar innocence and purity, a stability in meaning, into the world. Representing the past as well as the future, the child becomes a figure of reconstructive nostalgia, holding the promise of the regeneration of a home that had been lost though the trauma of the crime. The figure of the child becomes relevant when understanding trauma as a matter of a crisis of the sign. That is, in representing innocence and purity, the child symbolizes a state in which language and meaning are undisturbed and have not been affected by the crisis of the sign caused by trauma. In The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose writes about the glorification of the child in Victorian and 19th century children’s fiction. More specifically, she looks at how the beginnings of children’s fiction were influenced by the philosophical writings of Locke and Rousseau that depict the child as “a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state” (Rose 8). Though both Locke and Rousseau wrote about the imperfection and instability of language in reflecting the world – a suspicion what would now be called the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign as proposed by de Saussure (Rose 47) – the texts still contain the implication of the existence of some perfect or original and uncontaminated form of expression. That is, even though for Rousseau “language has gradually progressed into a set of abstractions, and has lost touch with the object, or sentiment, which it was originally intended to express” (Rose 47), the child, in representing an innocent and primitive state, offers the promise of the return of such an unmediated connection with the world. From this, Rose argues that the child is asked in Rousseau’s Emile “not only to retrieve a lost state of nature but also to take language back to its pure and uncontaminated source in the objects of the immediate world” (Rose 47). In Smilla we can see a similar depiction of the child as representing a lost point of origin. Explaining the complexities of human life, Smilla resorts to the metaphor of numbers:

“the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? (…) The negative numbers. The formalization that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows, even more, and the child discovers in- between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. (…) And human consciousness doesn’t stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers (…) It’s a form of madness” (Høeg 101-102). Gravemaker 32

Linking the natural numbers that are “whole and positive” with the “the small child”, we see Smilla making a similar comparison between the figure of child and a state of stability and purity as outlined by Rousseau and Locke. By contrast, the world of adulthood is defined by accumulating complexities, illustrated by the numbers that gradually become more and more complex, leading eventually to “a form of madness”. In this, Smilla depicts Rousseau’s depiction of language as having gradually progressed into a set of abstractions. Smilla thus illustrates a sense of gradually losing intimacy with the world, resulting in the homesickness that Boym claimed to be one of the underlying experiences of nostalgia. Rousseau’s and Smilla’s preoccupation with the restoration of the original form of language, then, goes hand in hand with the nature of the child: the innocence of the child is equated with the innocence of the word, representing both a state of unambiguous purity. Therefore, in being innocent, the child symbolizes the hope that it “can restore that innocence to us” (Rose 44), and that it can, arguably, impose a world that is unaffected by the disrupting effects of the crisis of the sign brought forth by trauma, in which one can feel “at home again”. From the idea that the figure of the child is able to restore a state that has not been distorted or intruded by the crisis of the sign, the child gains an almost messianic quality in providing the promise of a better future. As becomes evident from Smilla and Lake, the child is employed to explore ideas of a more prosperous future and the reconstruction of a lost home. In Smilla, there is an almost literal translation of the messianic quality of the child through the fact that its child, Isaiah, bears the same name as the prophet who foretold the coming of the messiah. Isaiah’s prophetic and messianic attributes are further expressed by the fact that for Smilla his death, as argued above, engenders a “fissure that has set [her] free” (Høeg 204) which liberates her from her crippling preoccupation with the past, and thereby arguably offers a better outlook on future. At the end Smilla has returned to Greenland and the landscape of her mother and her childhood. Standing on ice, she is surrounded by signs of Isaiah: “I’m on my way across the ice towards him [Tork], just as Isaiah was heading away from him. It’s as if I am Isaiah” (408). The fact that Smilla becomes one with Isaiah suggests, as Norseng argues, “the possibility of the child – the Smilla/Isaiah – being reborn” (Norseng 78) through which Smilla imagines an alternative reality: she is Isaiah “but on his way back now. To do something differently” (Høeg 408). This move away from the roof and Isaiah’s consequent death signifies a move away from a disturbing possible reality, “to see whether there might be an alternative” (408), thus arguably a potentially better future. And so for Smilla the appearance of the child Gravemaker 33 channels the image of an alternative reality and the reconstruction of a better future in which one can feel at home again. Lake similarly uses the figure of the child to express the desire for the promise of a reconstruction of the lost home. Throughout the series, many characters set out to create a better and alternative reality. This discontent with the present world is not only evident in Robin’s desire to ‘fix’ her own traumatic sentiments of un-belonging by providing a solution to the crime revolving around Tui, but also in ‘Paradise’, the women’s camp lead by the strange director GJ. The women are allegedly “in a lot of pain”, coming from “abused marriages, broken hearts, sex-addicts” (“Paradise Sold”), and seem to instead create their own alternative reality, their own paradise, by setting up the camp. In constructing a different world, the women long for an imagined lost past. That is, as Thornham argues quoting Mary Jacobs, we can see in the camp, which is only composed of women, the feminist nostalgic desire to recover a “lost mother-daughter relationship, a utopian state in which our relations to the body could be unalienated, and our psychic state whole5” (Jacobus 133 in Thornham 3). And so, their sentiment is motivated by feminist nostalgia: the camp is an “inversion of the male-dominated world of Laketop” (Thornham 7), an imagined feminist alternative to the violent reality of Laketop that the women (and the viewer) find themselves in. Yet, despite their efforts to construct a female utopia away from the male-dominated world, they continue fail: their camp is constantly invaded by male outsiders, and one of the women even engages in a relationship with Matt, the very embodiment of the abusive patriarchal power in Laketop. Moreover, as Thornham rightfully observes, the women “initiate no actions of their own; they are simply there, a spatial not a narrative presence (…) offer[ing] no solutions (…) no longer part of the stories of their own lives, and peripheral to that of Robin and Tui” (Thornham 7-8). Thus, rather than a serious attempt to create a future paradise, the women’s camp becomes a feminist parody, a postmenopausal fling of a group of rather odd women. Contrastively, the children offer a more successful attempt in creating an alternative reality and reconstructing a ‘home’. In creating a paradisal space by which they construct the implication of a better future, the child is in Lake a figure of reconstructive nostalgia: standing with one leg in the past and with the other in the future, the child fulfills the messianic role of reconstructing (rather than restoring) a world that is unaffected by the crime and the detective’s trauma. To illustrate, in “The Dark Creator”, Tui, who is approaching her due date, is visited

5 Here Jacobus criticizes the use of the Persephone and Demeter myth by feminists such as Adrienne Rich (1976), Phyllis Chesler (1972), and Marriane Hirsch (1989) to describe the mother-daughter relationship as opposed to the patriarchal Freudian Oedipus narrative. Gravemaker 34 by a group of friends in the woods where she is hiding. There, we see the children play, swim, eat, sleep, and celebrate Tui’s birthday together which forms a stark contrast with their lives in Laketop where they are seen as problematic and disadvantaged children. For a very brief moment, the children seem to have created their own little paradise where they are out of danger, away from the patriarchal violence of Laketop. For instance, earlier on in the same episode we see Jamie getting humiliated and repeatedly hit by Al Parker during a police investigation because he refuses to answer the questions. Al motivates the physical and verbal abuse saying that “it’s how men relate to each other” and that it is “how we work with kids who have got no dads: an older man teaches an arrogant little prick some respect” (“The Dark Creator”) which further emphasizes the extremely violent patriarchal discourse of Laketop. The children’s paradise is, however, short-lived: they are soon discovered by Matt’s men, resulting in a chase that costs Jamie’s life. Yet, the children’s attempts at constructing a better possible future is, unlike the women’s camp, not a futile attempt to escape the harshness of reality by chasing a romantic nostalgic fantasy. In fact, the children’s role in the narrative very much revolves around the reconstruction of a new home. That is, in the series, it is – next to Robin – the child who sets into motion moments of significance and salvation. By killing Matt Mitchum it is Tui who rids Laketop of “the Dark Creator”, the cause of the crime and the symbol of sexual trauma experienced by Robin and other women. Moreover, the fact that Tui gives birth on her own without any adult interference6 suggests that the act of bringing forth a future, embodied by Tui’s baby, the child of the child, lies in the hands of the child. Even though it is essentially the personification of Tui’s trauma, the baby also represents the promise of a new life that is still innocent and constitutes a lost point of origin. This promise of a new world is further emphasized by Tui’s child’s name, Noah, which is, like in Smilla, a reference to the biblical figure of the same name whose story is similarly about the reconstruction of a new and better world after a series of human sins. In giving birth to the child by herself and saving it from Matt’s malevolence, Tui represents the child as being a figure who is able to bring about, to reconstruct a better world, a home, that is untainted by trauma. However, Lake also highlights the difficulties of regenerating a new home after trauma. Again, this highlights the presence of reconstructive nostalgia as a tendency rather than an absolute type. While Tui has, by the conventions of the detective fiction, ‘solved’ the case by coming into final confrontation with Matt, the trauma of his incest and sexual violence still

6 Admittedly, Putty, a local tramp, was also present but with his simple mind and infantile manners he can also be understood as representing a child in an adult body. Gravemaker 35 lives forth in Tui’s child, suggesting the impossibility of entirely erasing trauma. Moreover, Tui initially shows a complete disregard of the child, leaving him in the care of Robin and Johnno when going out with her friends, which depicts the child’s future as being defined by rejection and neglect. Tui then almost immediately becomes the victim of another sexual violation at Al’s home, hinting at the inevitable continuation of trauma. Thus, through Tui’s rejection of the child and the instantaneous appearance of another potential sexual trauma, the series also reflects on the complexities of the reconstruction of a new and better home after the traumatic events of the crime. However, Lake still shows a tendency to place the reconstruction of a new future and the homebuilding in the hands of the child. When GJ leaves the women’s camp, Tui rushes after her employing her to stay. GJ responds, “You’ve got a real teacher now. Make sure you pay attention to him. Listen,” referring to Noah’s crying in the background. And so, by baptizing Noah as a teacher, a cultivator of growth and development, GJ suggests that it is the child who will make the reconstruction of a new home possible.

Conclusion As Lake and Smilla show, reconstructive nostalgia revolves around the desire of reconstructing a ‘home’ or a sense of belonging. For the reconstructive nostalgic, this sense of belonging had been lost due to the events of a trauma of the crime and their own trauma. Reconstructive nostalgia and the detective story thus follow a similar narrative: both are concerned with issues of the momentary inability of apprehension. Living in a world that has become disturbed by trauma, the reconstructive nostalgic expresses a longing for a moment before a perceived crisis of the sign through which they lost their sense of feeling at home in the world. Reconstructive nostalgia is thus a form of homesickness: a desire to regain a sense of belonging and to feel “at home” again in the world. As this chapter has demonstrated, the child plays a key role in this struggle of homebuilding. The child is thus a figure on which sentiments reconstructive nostalgia can be projected. Symbolizing a lost point of origin, the child is represented in both Smilla and Lake as holding the promise of reconstructing a lost home. The child personifies the Janus face of reconstructive nostalgia: being a figure of innocence and purity, enjoying a prelapsarian and lost state, the child faces the past but is also aimed towards the future by symbolizing the promise of a better world and the reconstruction of a lost home. And so, both the trauma-lifting promise of the detective narrative and the figure of the child are key concepts to reconstructive nostalgia. Both symbolize a promise of resolving the crisis of the sign and reconstructing a world where one can feel at “home” again. This Gravemaker 36 reconstruction (or, in Tui’s case, literal bearing) of a future is not an attempt to return or restore a lost past. The reconstructive nostalgic’s desire for the past is motivated by a longing to reconstruct, rather than restore, a home or a lost point of origin. In this reparation of a perceived sentiment of displacement, reconstructive nostalgia can become an emancipatory force. Analyzing the productive points of nostalgia, Saloul argues for an understanding for nostalgia not only as a romantic and illusory desire for an imagined past but also as a “productive struggle over a present that aims at constructing the future” (4), or, in other words, the construction of a home by resorting to the past. Whether Smilla and Robin succeed in reconstructing a home by solving the crime can be debated, and is a discussion beyond the scope of this thesis. Then again, as mentioned in the introduction, my aim is not to argue that reconstructive nostalgia is an absolute type. Rather, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, reconstructive nostalgic tendencies are present in works of detective fiction like Smilla and Lake, and these tendencies, that are different from other narratives of nostalgia, should be taken into account when analyzing the desire for the past in detective fiction.

Gravemaker 37

Chapter 3 Dancing with your Dead Colleague and Saving Mum and Dad: Preservative Nostalgia and the Melancholic Performance of Memory in Detective Fiction

If detective fiction is, essentially, a genre that fictionalizes the construction of narratives about the past through the formation of a story around the crime, then the genre’s constant negotiation and figuration of past images has the potential to display nostalgic sentiments that revolve around the preservation of an image of the past that is - or is on the verge of being - lost due to the events of the crime. In other words, detective fiction’s focus on the construction of narrative around the crime can be considered as a desire to archive or crystalize a certain notion of the past. Detective fiction may therefore be employed to express sentiments of preservative nostalgia, or the longing to preserve, ‘keep alive’, a certain idealized memory or narrative of the past that is lost or prone to be forgotten. In this chapter, in order to analyze the preservative nostalgic tendencies of detective fiction, I use the concepts of melancholia and performance in the exploration of the construction of notions of the past in two works of detective fiction: Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000) and Abi Morgan’s television drama series River (2015). I argue that both detectives have a melancholic relationship with their past. That is, rather than being plagued by their past, as I have argued to be characteristic of detective Smilla and detective Robin in chapter 1, Banks and River show an inability and unwillingness to let go of their pasts, and instead desire to maintain a relationship with what they have lost. In this nostalgic preservation of certain notions of the past, the detective performance plays a large role. That is, from the Gravemaker 38 assumption that memory is, essentially, a matter of performance and performativity, detective work can be considered as a performance in which certain perceptions of the past are rehearsed and thereby performatively actualized. Consequently, I claim that detective fiction and the act of the detective solving a crime perform the preservation and renegotiation of conceptions of the past that the detective desires to maintain or ‘keep alive’. The detective performance, then, becomes a preservative nostalgic performance of the conservation of idealized notions of the past. To make this argument, this chapter answers the following questions: How can the detectives’ relation to the past in Orphans and River be characterized? What is the significance of performativity and performance in remembering in River and Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans? What can these works tell us about the status of preservative nostalgia in detective fiction?

Banks’s and River’s Lost Pasts Both Orphans and River feature a detective who feels that their perception of the past is under threat or prone to be forgotten, and through this fear they express sentiments of preservative nostalgia. Orphans depicts England and Shanghai in the 1930s, forming the background of the life of private detective Christopher Banks. Though enjoying a successful career now, the novel shows that Banks still suffers from one ‘unsolved crime’: the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai when he was a still boy. Banks’s obsession with the past is not only the result of trauma and the consequent, as Cathy Caruth writes, “unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (Caruth Unclaimed Experience 2). Instead, rather than continuously reliving a traumatic event because it needs to be “integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language” in order to move past it (van der Kolk and van der Hart qtd. in Patchay 28-29), Banks is preoccupied with the past precisely because he does not want to part with it: he repeatedly relives the past through his memories because he feels that it is partially lost to him or is about to be forgotten. As he remarks, “over this past year, I have become increasingly preoccupied with my memories, a preoccupation encouraged by the discovery that these memories – of my childhood, of my parents – have lately begun to blur” (Ishiguro 80). Though also suffering from a trauma, Banks, then, has a different relationship with his past: his obsession with the past does not solely originate from the desire to defuse a trauma by making it comprehensible, but rather from the longing to preserve and hold on to a relationship with a memory that he feels to be slipping from his grasp. Gravemaker 39

Banks’s deep devotion to the search for his lost parents and his firm belief in their eventual recovery reveal his nostalgic longing. His nostalgia is not only defined by a longing for the retrieval of a lost past but also by a desire for a past image to continue in the present. Though Banks does not manage to recover his parents alive and both bodily and mentally intact (his father, having left his family for another woman, died of typhoid long ago, while his mother had been made a concubine by a Chinese warlord which has left her mentally damaged), he insists on romanticizing the past. Unlike his father, Banks continues to idealize his mother by assigning a heroic narrative to her persona: Banks recalls a memory of when he spend several days researching newspaper articles because he had been “given to belief as a child that [his mother] was a key figure in the anti-opium campaigns” (75). Likewise, upon hearing his mother’s terrible fate, he continues to apply this idealized narrative to his mother concluding that “my mother was, you might say, sacrificed for a greater cause” (343). This romanticization of his mother’s life, and his consequent refusal to face the bitter reality, is, arguably, a nostalgic act of preserving an idealized image of the past. Likewise, River’s detective John River (Stellan Skarsgård) is plagued by a traumatic event – the murder of his colleague, Sergeant Jacqueline ‘Stevie’ Stevenson (Nicola Walker) – but rather than revisiting the past in order to ‘cure’ the trauma, River’s relationship with the past is characterized by a desire to maintain an attachment with what he has lost; Stevie. In the series, River’s desire to preserve a connection with the object which has been lost because of the events of the crime are embodied by what he calls ‘manifests’, or the ghost-like reappearances of Stevie and other suspects and victims who have died during the murder cases he investigates. These manifests embody the conflicting voices that originate from River’s traumatized and conflicted mind, but also help him with the murder cases, talk to him, and keep him company. In particular his relationship with the manifest of Stevie is one that is defined by nostalgia and the desire to, quite literally, keep (his memory of) Stevie alive. For instance, River channels his nostalgic longing for the past onto the manifest of Stevie in episode 2 when she appears to him while waiting for his appointment with police psychologist Rosa (Georgina Rich). Stevie brings up the memory of the time when they had to spent a night in the hospital because River got injured during an arrest: “I got you a pack of frozen peas and sat with you all night until they could see you (…) and in the morning we ate Mars bars and you told me stuff you had never told anyone before” (episode 2). Illustrating here a memory of a unique, intimate moment, the manifest becomes a figure that not only embodies a past memory but also bonds of intimacy with people that have been lost in real life. Thus, as the manifests demonstrate, Gravemaker 40

River’s nostalgia is a longing for the preservation of the relationships with the people that he has lost in the past. River’s memory of Stevie is also characterized by anxiety of forgetting. This fear of forgetting reveals River’s preservative nostalgic sentiments. Speaking to Rosa, he says, “I’m losing her. She’s changing” (episode 4), which shows that rather than lamenting the fact that he is being deprived of a memory, it is the transformation of memory an sich that he mainly grieves. In episode 2 the manifest of Stevie asks River what he can remember about her appearance. River struggles to picture her, repeatedly exclaiming, “I can’t remember” (River episode 2) which shows his distress over the idea of losing that memory, and reveals a consequent desire to reconnect and secure a certain notion of the past. This memory game is, then, an attempt to preserve the memory of Stevie which he feels is on the verge of being forgotten revealing River’s preservative nostalgic sentiments. Likewise, in the opening scene of the first episode, we see River getting fast food at a drive thru with the manifest of Stevie. As we later learn from the plastic cup with the impression of her lipstick on it, this event constitutes one of his last moments with her.7 Stevie’s car performance of Tina Charles’s I Love to Love, a rather touching and seemingly fond memory, which River also repeats in the karaoke bar at the end of the episode, is arguably also a preservative nostalgic act of keeping alive his bond with Stevie. Thus, throughout the series, River’s longing for the past is defined by a desire to preserve bonds of intimacy with the people he has lost.

Melancholic Detectives Banks’s and River’s preoccupations with the past and their refusal to break from it, demonstrate both detectives’ melancholia. Understanding melancholia as the desire for preservation and the refusal or inability to let go of a certain past memory, the concept shows a preservative nostalgic tendency which we can also find in When we were Orphans and River. In this chapter I use the conceptualization of melancholia as outlined by Freud who defines it by comparing and contrasting it to mourning. He claims that mourning is “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (153), while for the melancholiac “the loss is in one in himself” (157) in which “reproaches against a loved object (…) have been shifted on to the

7 Later, River sticks the cup to his wall at home together with all the other pieces of evidence around the investigation of Stevie’s murder. Apart from helping him with the case, this homemade evidence board, consisting of objects that compose a reconstruction of Stevie’s identity and her past, can also be seen as a site of memorial. Gravemaker 41 patient’s own ego” (Freud 158). Thus Freud argues that whereas in mourning “the loss of the object is undoubtedly surmounted” (166), melancholia constitutes a more fundamental change in the ego, cultivating an enduring devotion to the lost object. As Eng and Kazanjian write, “a mourning without end, melancholia results from the inability to resolve the grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of a loved object, place, or ideal” (Eng and Kazanjian 3). Melancholia therefore represents the inability or the refusal to let the object, ideal, place, etc. that has been lost, go - a breaking that allows the mourner, in contrast, to move on. In this inability to depart from a lost object, I argue, lies the similarities with preservative nostalgia. Both discourses and practices of loss, nostalgia and melancholia have some conceptual overlap: representing an attachment in which someone refuses or is not able to let an object go, melancholia seems to reflect the condition of the preservative nostalgic. That is, the fact that in melancholia there is the fantasy of “the lost object (…) introduced ‘into’ the body as a result of a refusal to mourn the loss” (Hanson 89), while in preservative nostalgia there is a longing to maintain a connection with a certain notion of the past, shows that both revolve around the desire to incorporate or preserve a lost object or memory. Banks’s and River’s relationship with their past can, likewise, be described as being motivated by the melancholic refusal to let a lost object go. To illustrate, Banks maintains a rather melancholic relationship with the past in the sense that he refuses to depart from his idealized notion of it. That is to say, by refusing to believe that his parents are permanently gone, Banks does not acknowledge, in a similar way as Hanson claims to be characteristic of the melancholiac, that “there has been anything to lose” (89). Thus in his perpetual denial of his parents’ death, Banks refuses the process of ‘normal’ mourning in which one “declare[s] the object dead and (…) move[s] on to invest in other objects” (Eng and Kazanjian 3). Instead, like the melancholiac, Banks forever chases the shadow of a lost object – his parents. Reflecting on his status as an orphan, Banks muses that his orphanhood forever binds him to a chronic connection with what he has lost which forbids him to move on: “Our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years as shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best as we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm” (Ishiguro 367). Thus the fact that Banks’s notes that he is bound to an existence in which he perpetually chases something intangible and ghostly – his missing parents – and that in this wild goose chase he is “permitted no calm” highlights his melancholic tendencies in refusing to let the past go. And so Weston claims that Banks fits the characterization of the melancholiac well: “He does take his losses into his psyche in the manner of melancholic incorporation, and there he makes them the foundation for his life” (349). Thus Gravemaker 42

Banks’s melancholic attachment to the past, his refusal to let go and his desire to preserve it, reflects his preservative nostalgic sentiments. As for River, the continuous return of the dead persons who appear to River because of some “unfinished business” or who keep him company or pester him, constitute an enduring melancholic “devotion on the part of the ego to the lost object” (Eng and Kazinjian 3). In this, the figure of the ghost, embodied by the manifests, embodies River’s melancholic attachment to lost objects and the past. With the ghostly qualities of the manifests reflecting River’s melancholic state of mind, River seems to follow a similar line as the critics who often resort to spectral metaphors when conceptualizing melancholia. For instance, Eng and Kazinjan define melancholia as an “ongoing and open relationship with the past,” which involves “bringing its ghosts and spectres … into the present” (own italics 4). In a similar way, Judith Butler notes that within the melancholic “the lost object continues to haunt and inhabit the ego as one of its constitutive identifications” (own italics, Butler, 1995: 167). Being a figure of return – “a question of repetition: a specter is always revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back (Derrida 11) – the ghost’s melancholic tendency, the refusal of something that has been lost (or dead) to be done away with, becomes visible. Considering the detectives’ melancholic attachment to their lost pasts and their desire to keep alive a certain memory, Orphan and River illustrate the preservative nostalgic tendencies of the detective story. Detective fiction in general can be regarded as a genre that has melancholia incorporated in its narrative. In its constant preoccupation with something that has been lost (i.e. killed, abducted, stolen) due to the events of the crime, and its inability to let that object go – since the existence of the narrative is dependent on the fact that this loss is considered to be a (narrative) problem or an issue that is constantly brought to the attention of the detective (and the reader) – melancholia is a staple of the detective genre. In being constantly preoccupied with a lost object, Munt claims that detective fiction has a ‘performative force of grief’ in which melancholia is transformed into mourning. That is to say, in its generic promise of a resolution – the eventual solution of the crime – detective fiction holds the potential prospect of the recognition and acknowledgement of the object that has been lost, thereby alluding to a possible transformation of melancholia into ‘normal’ mourning. As she writes,

“[crime novels] represent the moment of death, and they revise it, replay it, until the memory becomes de-cathected. They bring the two temporalities together - the original event and our grieving present - and move us to restitution, through the passages of time that serial reading, and grief, require. Finally, we may know what we have lost” (140).

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The performative force of detective fiction that Munt illustrates here is, then, similar to the detective narrative’s promise of salvation from trauma which I discussed in chapter 18. Namely, in revolving around the pursuit of a satisfying resolution to the crime, the detective narrative can bring about a revelation in which the melancholic detective “know[s] what [they] have lost” (Munt 140) which transforms their melancholia into normal mourning, allowing them to break with their preoccupation with the past and to move on. However, rather than Munt’s illustrated ‘performative force of grief’ in which detective fiction’s eventual move to the resolution of the crime allows the melancholiac to transform his melancholia into regular mourning, detective fiction can also contain a nostalgic performance of the preservation of memory. Instead of turning melancholia into mourning by the means of the detective narrative, Orphans and River employ the conventions of detective fiction as a nostalgic performance through which the detectives’ idealized memories and their intimacy with their lost pasts are preserved9.

Performance and Preservative Nostalgia In the preservative nostalgic desire that guides the narrative of both works of detective fiction, the performance of the detective role and the adherence to the narrative of detective fiction becomes a way for the detectives to preserve their idealized past memory. River’s performance of the detective allows him to internalize the past, embodied by the appearances of manifests, by which he maintains an ongoing relationship with lost objects and the past. In Orphans Banks likewise creates through the performance of the detective an alternative reality in which his idealized notions of the past are preserved. In showing how Banks lives in an alternative reality constructed by the detective narrative, the novel, additionally, provides metacommentary on detective fiction’s literary status and its tendency to create a world in which romanticized and idealized notions of the world are safeguarded.

8 See page 23-36. 9 I recognize that this brings nostalgia and mourning together, and that this paragraph may suggest that reconstructive nostalgia is a form of mourning, and that preservative nostalgia is a form of melancholia. However, there is a fundamental difference between mourning/melancholia and nostalgia. Indeed, both mourning and nostalgia denote a sadness for dealing with a certain loss. Yet, while mourning refers to mere sorrow, the concept of nostalgia also expresses the therapeutic practice of dealing with that sorrow by reveling in idealized and romanticized images of the past – images that the preservative nostalgic wishes to maintain, and the reconstructive nostalgic longs to reconstruct in the form of a new home. As Dickinson and Erben write, “Nostalgic thoughts mourn a loss but they also include acceptance of the loss, and it is that acceptance that makes possible a pleasurable feeling along with an out-rush of regret” (223). In other words, whereas mourning concerns sadness and grief for a lost past, nostalgia is a regretful kind of pleasure that thrives in wondering about a romanticized past.

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Remembering and memory relies on performance for its processes and existence since the act of remembering and keeping “alive” a certain idea and memory of the past is done through constant re-enactment. Rather than being an object or image that we possess, “like books in a library that we can pull down, open up, and read” (Conway 4 in Smith 58), memory is an active process that demands constant rehearsal, and often - a posteriori - requires a (re)negotiation and (re)configuration of its meaning. As Crouch argues, “[we] do not simply remember by picking the memory up momentarily, [we] return to it through performance and reform it. Time, too, is performed again and again” (66). The meaning of memory and its continuation and relevance in the present thus relies on constant recital and return: memory practices such as commemorative ceremonies, as Smith claims, “rehearse master narratives that represent collective autobiography, sustained and remembered through ritual performance” (65). In this emphasis on the iterability and repetition of the performance of memory, its performative qualities, its ability to change or affect reality through utterances and acts, becomes evident. As Mieke Bal, using the concept of memory to bridge the conceptual and disciplinary divide between performance and performativity, writes, “[m]emory is no longer passive but active, and enactment or re-enactment; not something that happens to us but something we do – perform performatively” (190). Memory, then, is not only a performance, or a re-enactment based on a pre-existing script, but also a performative act since it has the ability to, as Judith Butler emphasizes in her work on the performative repetition and reiterations of the past, “consitut[e] a reality that is in some sense new” (“Performative Acts” 527). This performative quality of the performance of memory, i.e. its ability to construct new and alternative realities, is especially relevant for the discussion of the performance of the detective in relation to preservative nostalgia. That is, as both Orphans and River show, the performance of the detective becomes a way in which one can construct different realities whereby idealized notions of the past are preserved. Throughout this section I use the phrases “detective performance” and “the performance of the detective”, and by this I refer to the job-specific tasks the detective, i.e. providing a solution or narrative to the mystery of the crime through questioning suspects, the inspection of clues, reasoning, etc. All these acts, or performances, of the detective have a performative force in that they constitute a construction of reality or a narrative around the past, and in this construction of notions of the past lies its preservative nostalgic tendencies. River performatively constructs a different reality or a space in which he preserves an idealized memory and image of the past. This alternative reality enables him to preserve memories and idealized notions of the past that were on the verge of getting lost or being Gravemaker 45 forgotten. In the final episode, after the revelation of Stevie’s murderer, we see River going on a dinner date with the manifest of Stevie. Meeting in the same Chinese restaurant and having, seemingly, the same conversation, the two seem to reproduce the evening of Stevie’s murder. Through their repeated conversational cues and metacommentary – “and then you say…”, “we can skip the next bit”, “this is when you give me the 10K and you say…” – it becomes apparent that this evening constitutes a reenactment, a performance, of a past memory. In this performance, Stevie’s manifest urges River to confess his love for her. Once more, however, River falters and runs after her, seeing her getting shot again when she crosses the road. It is only then that he manages to say, “I love you. I love you more than life,” upon which Stevie, says “and then you say? Sing, you nutter. Sing.” The two then perform a song-and-dance routine to Tina Charles’s I Love to Love. This quite literal performance is not only a reenactment of their performance in the first episode, but it can also be understood as a performance that constructs a romanticized reality, as can be seen from the lights suddenly appearing on surrounding buildings. The performance creates an alternative reality in which an idealized memory and a lost object are preserved. Though this passage nicely illustrates the role of performance in the preservation of memory, this dance routine with Stevie is, of course, not a detective performance. In fact, on first sight, it seems as though River’s performance of the detective seems to actually problematize the preservation of notions of the past. River’s detective work forms a danger to his memory of Stevie. Throughout the case, River unravels more and more secrets about Stevie – a suspicious romantic relationship with a married illegal immigrant, a teenage pregnancy – which problematize River’s preservation of his beloved memory of her. As mentioned before, River feels that that he is “losing her. She’s changing” (episode 4). Additionally, when River is – somewhat reluctantly – on the verge of discovering “the truth” behind Stevie’s murder, Stevie’s manifest reminds him, “You are caught in what is called a paradox, my friend. The closer you get to the truth, the further away you’ll get from me. From who I was. And then you’ll see who I really am” (Episode 6). The fact that whenever River gets closer to the truth, he feels that he is moving away from his memory of Stevie, reveals that the performance of the detective, in fact, has the potential to bring about a break from idealized notions of past. However, despite the fact that River’s detective work forms a threat to his memory of Stevie, it is through the manifests that he maintains an attachment to the past and the lost objects. Thus, the performance does not only bring about a break from the past but also forms an incorporation of a past loss by which the lost objects, symbolized by the manifests, are preserved in his mind and memory. In other words, the people who die and continue to haunt Gravemaker 46 him as manifests later on because of some ‘unresolved business’ are not ‘exorcised’ through River’s detective work but rather transformed and internalized, thereby preserved. The manifest of Riley, a drugs dealer who River chased to his death because he believed him to be the murderer of Stevie, reappears at the end of the first episode with the message, “I didn’t do it” (episode 1). Riley continues to haunt River, demanding him to clear his name. When River finally determines that Riley was innocent, the manifest disappears, seemingly signaling a break from a lost object. Crucially, however, he returns in the final episode when River is on his way to his imaginary date with Stevie, commenting, quite friendly, on River’s choice of roses; “Nice, blud. Nice. Don’t be nervous, man. You can do this” (episode 6). This exchange shows that rather than constituting a break from a lost object, River’s detective work – here, his clearance of Riley’s name and thereby supposedly disarming his potential malevolence as a manifest – actually engenders a preservation of the lost object in his mind and memory. For River, his detective work does not generate a (de)parting from the lost object but actually an internalization and preservation of lost objects. In short, River’s detective work becomes a performance of the preservation of memory. Rather than providing a moment that enables him to let the lost objects go, River’s incorporation of the manifests allow him (and sometimes force him) to have a continuous attachment with a lost object and the past. In her rereading of Freud’s melancholia, Judith Butler claims that since in melancholia a loss or a breaking of attachment is refused, there is no detachment but rather an incorporation of the attachment which becomes “a magical, a psychic, form of preserving the object” (own italics, Butler “Melancholy Gender” 167). This ‘magical’ and ‘psychic’ form of preservation seems to reflect River’s manifests which carry a similar psychic and psychological connotation. As Butler continues, the loss of the object in the external world is therefore permitted precisely because the melancholic attachment “provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego itself and, hence, to avert the loss as a complete loss” (“Melancholy Gender” 167). In other words, if the object can no longer exist in the external world, the melancholic makes it live internally, and that internalization will be a way to disavow that loss and to keep it at bay. Like Butler’s melancholic, River therefore refuses the loss of the objects by internalizing them, postponing their recognition and thereby forever preserving them internally, in the form of manifests. With his internalization of lost objects and his inability to let them go, it can consequently be argued that River’s detective work is essentially a performance of a loss that “is refused and incorporated in the performed identification” (Butler “Melancholy Gender” 176). That is to say, River’s detective performance allegorizes a loss it refuses grieve, an incorporated fantasy of melancholia Gravemaker 47 whereby an object is phantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let go: it is a nostalgic performance of loss that preserves memory and lost objects internally. Whether River is particularly nostalgic for Riley is highly doubtful since he has never spoken to him, and so his attachment to Riley is more likely to be motivated by guilt for being responsible for his death. However, the nostalgic undertones of his relationship with the manifests are clearly present in the manifest of Erin, a missing teenage girl whose body River and Stevie were supposed to recover. In the first episode, we see River brushing his teeth and sitting at his breakfast table with Erin which, since the viewer has not been introduced to her case yet, gives the idea that she is River’s teenage daughter – the revelation of her identity comes later when River scours Erin’s Facebook page as a part of his investigation. That night, River watches a videotape, given to him by Erin’s mother, that shows Erin playing on the beach as a young child. Clearly touched by these images, he asks Erin, who is sitting next to him, “What happened to you?” (Episode 1), a question that not only arises from the context of his investigation but also contains some nostalgic undertones, incited by the videotape that depicts the images of a lost time. Erin does not reply but keeps staring at the TV screen. She then says, “You’re going to miss me,” at which River replies, “Well, you haven’t gone yet” (episode 1). Erin’s case, the subject of River’s detective performance, is, then, fueled by preservative nostalgia. River’s answer “Well you haven’t gone yet,” might not only be an observation or a witty reply to Erin’s bold statement but also a protest, a refusal to depart from Erin, and a desire to preserve her in his mind as a manifest. And so, like Riley, Erin too returns in the last episode, helping him pick out a tie for his date with Stevie. These examples illustrate that rather than being, as Munt claims, a performance of grief that turns melancholia into mourning, allowing the subject to move on, in River the detective performance becomes a performance of preservative nostalgia: an act that allows the detective to eternally and internally preserve the idealized lost object and memory. The performance of the detective in Orphans is narratively more complex compared to River. On the one hand, the detective performance becomes for Banks a way to preserve the romanticized worldview that he has had since he was a child. In a similar way as River, the detective performance thus allows Banks to eternally postpone and disavow the final departure from what he has lost – his parents – through the construction of an alternative reality in which his parents (and his innocence) are preserved. What makes Orphans a more complex case is that the novel also offers metafictional commentary on detective fiction’s tendency to visualize a rather romantic and simplified world. And so as a literary performance, the novel comments on the preservative nostalgic inclination of the detective genre. Gravemaker 48

In Orphans, the detective game which Banks and Akira performed in the back garden of Banks’s house in Shanghai can be seen as a performance by which an alternative and idealized reality around Banks’s missing father is, performatively, constructed. Revolving around the construction of scenarios in which they find Banks’s missing father, the performance of the detective game, which he continues to perform (as a real detective) in his adult years, enables Banks to create what the novel claims to be an “enchanted world” (346) in which idealized notions of his past and his childhood innocence are stored. To illustrate, Banks recalls the sleepless nights in which he would resort to imagining detective scenarios in which “Shanghai’s detectives moving all around the city, closing in ever more tightly on the kidnappers. Sometimes, lying in the dark, I found myself weaving quite elaborate dramas before dropping off to sleep, many of which would then serve as material for Akira and me the next day” (130). This quote shows that the performance of detective is not employed to figure out “the truth” of a certain past. Rather, Banks performs the detective scenarios in the detective game with Akira in order to imagine alternative or idiosyncratic realities concerning the past, making the loss more easy to deal with. As Drag claims, remembering in many of Ishiguro’s novels often refer to attempts to “recreate the past in order to make it more palatable, rather than to reproduce the actual course and circumstances of events” (Drag 2).10 The construction of alternative and more “palatable” narratives around his missing father via his and Akira’s detective game becomes particularly evident when Banks describes how certain narratives purposely ignored or renegotiated existing notions of reality. As Banks recalls, “despite being surrounded by the horrors of the Chinese district,” it was always the case that “the house in which father was held was comfortable and clean” and that Akira “took great care to ensure my father’s comfort and dignity in all our dramas” (131). This reveals that Banks plays detective (both as a child and as an adult) in order to keep the darkness of adulthood and reality at bay. Banks’s nostalgic idealization of the world and his inability to recognize the occasional horrors of the adulthood becomes particularly evident in the climax of the novel. When entering an abandoned warzone in Shanghai because he believes his parents are being held captive in one of the houses, Banks is rather oblivious to the devastating and horrifying impact of the Second

10 The novel occasionally reflects on this process of remembering and the act of constructing idealized notions of the past based on individual memories in which disturbances or reconfiguration of memory take place due to the desire to make them more digestible. For instance, Banks notes that he had felt “somewhat offended” when a former classmate said that the Banks was “such an odd bird at school” which comes into conflict with Banks’s own memory of his schoolyears (Ishiguro 7). Likewise, reflecting on a disagreement over a past memory with another former classmate, Banks asserts that the memory in question was “simply a piece of self-delusion on Morgan’s part – in all likelihood something he had invented years ago to make more palatable the memories of an unhappy period” (217). Gravemaker 49

Sino-Japanese War. Upon entering the house he finds a young Chinese girl with a violently murdered family. As Banks observes,

“Near the back, over by the wall, was the body of a woman who might have been the young girl’s mother. Possibly the blast had thrown her there and she was lying where she had landed (…) One arm had been torn off at the elbow, and she was now pointing the stump to the sky (…) Finally, closest to where we were standing (…) lay a boy slightly older than the little girl we had followed in. One of his legs had been blown off at the hip, from where surprisingly long entrails, like decorative tails of a kite, had unfurled over the matting” (Ishiguro 317-318).

Though Banks is here exposed to a scene that could possibly destruct his innocent worldview, he still resorts to romantic metaphorical language, comparing for instance the boy’s intestines with the rather childlike metaphor of the “decorative tails of a kite”, which suggests that he continues to romanticize the world around him. The preservative nostalgic safeguarding of his “enchanted world” through his detective performance is also comes to the surface when addressing the girl about the horror:

“‘Look here… All of this’ – I gestured at the carnage, of which she seemed completely oblivious – ‘it’s awfully bad luck. But look, you’ve survived, and really, you’ll see, you’ll make a pretty decent show of it if you just… if you just keep your courage (…) I swear to you, whoever did this to you, whoever did all this, whoever did this ghastly thing, they won’t escape justice. You may not know who I am, but I am the person you want. I’ll see to it they won’t get away. Don’t you worry, I’ll… I’ll…’ I had been fumbling about in my jacket, but now I found my magnifying glass and showed it to her. ‘Look you see?’” (Ishiguro 319).

This passage demonstrates that through his assurance that “they won’t escape justice” and that “I am the person you want,” Banks uses the logic of his detective fantasy to escape the reality of this traumatic event, which emphasizes the role of the detective performance in the preservative nostalgia for his “enchanted world”. Though clearly affected by the scene, as becomes apparent from his recurrent hesitations and stammering, Banks still fervently clings onto his detective fantasy, symbolized by the frantic search for his magnifying glass, the symbol of his role and performance of the detective. Banks’s continuous enactment of the role of the detective, not only through playing the role of potential savior but also through the reenactment of its romantic fantasy and narrative in the world around him, constitutes a nostalgic performance in which innocence and his idealized memory about his childhood and his parents are preserved. Thus in the novel, the performance of the detective becomes an important device by which idealized memories and ideas about a certain past are imagined and performatively constructed. That is, the detective performance allows Banks to channel the safety and Gravemaker 50 romanticism of the detective world, the world of his childhood, onto a reality that is defined by loss, destruction, and trauma. That Banks’s detective ambitions originate from a game that he used to play as a child, reveals the elements of performance and performativity underlying the role of the detective. The novel reflects on role of the detective performance in creating idiosyncratic realities through metafictional commentary on the genre’s tendency to display a romanticized image of the world and a nostalgic longing to preserve innocence. Upon hearing Banks’s ambition to become a detective, a party guest says, “a lot of young men dream of becoming detectives (…) One feels so idealistic at your age. Longs to be the great detective of the day. To root out single- handedly all the evil in the world. Commendable” (Ishiguro 18). Alluding to the naiveté of the detective dream, calling it, somewhat patronizingly, “commendable” (Ishiguro 18), the novel frames the classic detective narrative as offering a rather naïve and childlike vision on the world in which “evil” can be rooted out single-handedly, through which, supposedly, the world’s purity and innocence can live on. Banks seems to demonstrate this idea later on in the novel as well. Reassuring a discouraged fellow inspector, Banks comments that their duty “is to combat evil, we are… how might I put it? We’re like the twine that holds together the slats of a wooden blind. Should we fail to hold strong, then everything will scatter” (Ishiguro 161). With a reference to the venetian blinds typically found in film noir, the novel, metaficionally, hints at the firm and naïve belief in the preservative power of the detective in being able to uphold the “goodness” and innocence of the world, generally found in detective fiction. The metaphor of the blinds is later picked up again by uncle Phillip during a meeting in which the two seem to stage the final confrontation and the revelation of the criminal – a setting that alludes to the genre conventions of detective fiction:

“A detective! What good is that to anyone? Stolen jewels, aristocrats murdered for their inheritance. Do you suppose that’s all there is to contend with? Your mother, she wanted you to love in your enchanted world forever. But it’s impossible. In the end it has to shatter” (346).

Using the same metaphor of the blinds which Banks wished to keep intact, thereby upholding the fantasy of the detective that has been keeping him in the “enchanted world” of his childhood, uncle Phillip’s desire to let it shatter is a contestation to Banks’s childlike and melancholic performance of the detective that forever keeps him attached to an object and an ideal that has largely been lost. In this, the novel frames detective fiction as being a narrative that imagines an idealized and uncomplicated world. As Finney claims, detective fiction creates Gravemaker 51

“a closed world from which evil can be separated and expelled. It represents a primitive desire for a prelapsarian world of innocence. In it evil, like the serpent, is an extraneous element that attempts to invade this paradisal state and can be defeated by the forces of righteousness” (Finney n.p.). In depicting a detective who lives a delusional life in an “enchanted world”, the novel thus offers metafictional commentary on the performance of the detective, revealing the preservative nostalgic tendencies of the genre.

Conclusion While reconstructive nostalgia represents the longing for the reconstruction of a new home or a sense of belonging elsewhere, the preservative nostalgic continues to linger around the ruins of their lost home. Also plagued by the traumatic aftermath of the loss of a home or a loved one, the preservative nostalgic deals with their pain by idealizing the past. This idealization, or the construction of an idiosyncratic “enchanted world”, enables them to keep alive the persons or ideals that have been lost or are on the verge of being lost. Obsessed with an obsolete or, in River’s case, a literally ‘dead’ image of the past, the preservative nostalgic’s goal is not to return to that past: they long for their past to be preserved and crystalized in the form of a (official) narrative. The performance of the detective, a performance that involves the construction of a narrative around a lost object or past, is a discourse of preservative nostalgia since it provides the opportunity to keep a desired notion of the past ‘alive’. In other words, the detective performance becomes a device in which a new reality is constructed, and in that reality, the detectives desired notions of the past can be preserved. Detective fiction is, then, not only, as Munt proposes, a performative force of grief in which the construction of a narrative about the past forces the subject’s melancholia to be transformed to regular mourning that allows them to move on, as is the case for the detectives in chapter 1. Rather, in this chapter, I have shown that detective fiction can also constitute a performance in which the detective longs for the lost object to be internalized and (forever) preserved.

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CONCLUSION The Detective and The Ruins of the Home

Detective fiction’s nostalgic tendencies do not solely lie in pastoral images of the British countryside that display a slower time and way of life, nor in the rejuvenation of old detective icons. The longing for the past is interwoven in the narrative and genre conventions of detective fiction. Set in a world that has dramatically changed due to the devastating impact of the crime where a detective sets out to solve this crime and thereby bring back the world’s lost order, the detective story is defined by a nostalgic desire to return to a past state. Yet, though detective fiction offers the promise of the restoration of order, the genre is at the same time defined by the lamentation of the complete irrevocability of the past. Its past is in ruins: the dead cannot be brought back to life, and its missing are either completely lost or so much changed that a return to a prelapsarian moment is not possible. Though irrecoverable, these ruins do not compose for the detective finality but become the start of reflection and longing. Writing on loss, Judith Butler proposes, “we might say, in Benjaminian fashion, that thought emerges from the ruins, as the ruins, of (…) decimation” (“After Loss” 468). Here Butler sketches the landscape of the detective novel and the nostalgic: for both, death and loss do not constitute the end but rather the beginning of thought and desire. And so, as I have argued in this thesis, detective fiction is a nostalgic genre par excellence. Yet, the works of detective fiction that I have used in this thesis also display different nostalgias and ways of relating to the past than other narratives of nostalgia. I have Gravemaker 53 argued that Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia do not entirely fit the genre conventions and narrative of detective fiction. Namely, the former’s belief in the nostos or the homecoming does not agree with detective genre’s reliance on the irrevocability of the past. Additionally, its nationalist undertones is not suitable for an approach that focuses on nostalgia expressed on an individual level rather than within a socio-political environment. As for reflective nostalgia, its ironic and fragmentary narrative that saw collective memory as a “playground (…) of multiple individual recollections” (Boym 54) does not accurately depict the detective’s desire for the past. In fact, to extract and reduce from multiple recollections one true and homogeneous story is their very task. As an addition to the existing narratives and criticism on nostalgia, I have proposed reconstructive and preservative nostalgia as more suitable concepts for depicting the ways of relating to the past in detective fiction. These nostalgias relate differently to the past, the ruins of their home, and feelings of displacement. For the reconstructive nostalgic, the ruins of the lost home has left them feeling displaced. Rather than longing to restore or return to these ruins, the reconstructive nostalgic knows that they are long beyond repair, and they consequently desire to reconstruct a new place where they can feel at home. The arrival of another break, another discontinuation in the normal state of affairs that is caused by the events of the crime that the detectives investigate, creates a moment of action. For Smilla, Isaiah’s death was such a break that set her into motion. Likewise, when Robin looked at Tui, she may have seen her violated and broken self. And so, Robin’s search for Tui, her efforts to recover her, might have also have been an attempt to bring herself home, somewhere else. Accordingly, rather than being returned to her ‘home’ with her father, the “Dark Creator”, Tui is brought, symbolically, to a new home, to GJ’s ‘Paradise’. The preservative nostalgic, on the other hand, does not wish to abandon their ruined home in the first place: though it leaks, contains cracks and weathered paint, and is on the verge of falling down, they continue to defend, uphold, and revel in it. For Banks, the ruins are a place of wonder, the arena of his childhood detective fantasy that keeps the darkness of adulthood and war safely outside. Similarly, River uses his ruins like a fortress where he keeps the lost objects and the loved ones of his past intact. And so, while the home of these detectives is all in ruins, the way each relate to the ruins of their home is entirely different, which shows the importance of providing multiple narratives of nostalgia. I believe that the discussions in his thesis prompt us to reconsider several concepts and phenomena both within and outside the realm of detective fiction. As for the figure of the child, in chapter 2 I have demonstrated that the child can be used to restore a certain innocence, and that it represents the promise of the regeneration of a lost sense of belonging. This innocence Gravemaker 54 may not only be understood in the context of nostalgia but also in relation to the contestation of social issues. Analyzing Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Detective and Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, Boone claims that the introduction of the child in the crime story confers innocence upon social issues that are often in the adult world taken for granted (Boone 46-47). Boone is especially focused on how these works of children’s detective fiction mystify and thereby criticize class issues, offering “a rewriting of American class relations” (Boone 47). However, the child can also be used to question other social issues relating, for instance, to gender, race, sexuality, etc. which I have not discussed in this thesis. Furthermore, chapter 3 has illustrated how Banks and River use the detective performance to create alternative realities. This is not unique: performance is embedded in detective fiction. The criminal, for example, is a world-class performer, a twister and creator of realities: they lie, deceive, disguise themselves, and in hiding their true nature pretend to be someone else. Peach argues that this masquerade provides a space in which larger issues “especially the construction of gender and the enactment of gendered social relations, might be pursued” (Peach ix). In other words, Peach develops the notion that crime in detective fiction is a performance that is constructed from a mix of dominant and subversive cultural constructs. The performance of the criminal – their subversion and mimicry of social constructs – consequently offers a reading of the crime (as opposed to the investigation, as I have mentioned in the introduction11) as site for the contestation of social norms. Even though I have argued that reconstructive and preservative nostalgia are narratives of detective fiction, I want to suggest that it is also worthwhile to study their relevance outside the detective genre. This may involve genres that also revolve around the construction of narratives around the past, such as (meta)fictional novels on historical and biographical writing, as these novels employ similar conventions and methods as the detective genre. Commenting on the similarity between works of historians and that of fictional detectives, Winks argues as follows: “The historian must collect, interpret, and then explain his evidence by methods which are not greatly different from those techniques employed by the detective, or at least the detective in fiction” (Winks in Scaggs 123-24). Additionally, Marcus’s characterization of the pursuit of the biographer for knowledge on his subject echoes the methods of the detective. The biographer “track[s] his or her subject across the territory, following (in) his or her footsteps, and often losing the trail” exploring the fragments of the subjects’ life, their archival traces or “literary remains” (Marcus 263-64). With a past that lies at the mercy of the interpretative acts

11 See pages 6-7. Gravemaker 55 of the fictional historian or biographer, the possibility arises that their motivations for the investigation are purely nostalgic. Rather than saying that detective fiction is inherently nostalgic, we can perhaps also say that nostalgia is, inherently, a detective story: that the detective story fictionalizes the construction of narratives and stories around the past. In this context, River’s observation that “they don’t come in neat lines, memory. They come in bits and you have to try to piece them together” (episode 2) is not just about memory but also describes the detangling, deciphering, and deciding practices of the detective. This brings me back to the aim of this thesis: rather than applying existing conceptual frames of nostalgia to Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, Top of the Lake, When We Were Orphans, and River, I went, as a hard-boiled detective would say, ‘rogue’: disregarding the conventional frameworks and instructions, I set out to argue that the ‘clues’ that I found in these works of detective fiction lead down a different path, to a different story of nostalgia. Gathering clues and evidence throughout this thesis, I have built a case around the introduction of reconstructive and preservative nostalgia as two new narratives of nostalgia. [final line?]

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