Defective Inspectors: Crime-fiction Pastiche in Late Twentieth-century French Literature

Simon Kemp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351569941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Crime fiction is a popular target for literary pastiche in France. From the nouveau roman and the Oulipo group to the current avant-garde, writers have seized on the genre to exploit it for their own ends, toying with its traditional plots and characters, and exploring its preoccupations with perception, reason and truth. In the first full-length study of the phenomenon, Simon Kemp's investigation centres on four major writers of the twentieth century, Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922), Michel Butor (b. 1926), Georges Perec (193682) and Jean Echenoz (b. 1947). Out of their varied encounters with the genre, from deconstruction of the classic detective story to homage to the roman noir, Kemp elucidates the complex relationship between the pasticheur and his target, which demands an entirely new assessment of pastiche as a literary form.

CHAPTER 1
Reflecting

Bien qu'il s'endormît régulièrement avant le film au cinéma, il sut tout de suite que c'était un cadavre. [Despite the fact that, in the cinema, he would regularly doze off before the film started, he knew straight away that it was a corpse.]

SÉBASTIEN JAPRISOT, Compartiment tueurs

Crime fiction pastiche reflects the genre proper, but it is a reflection in no ordinary mirror. In the pastiche texts we find murders and investigations, detectives and suspects, just as in the conventional detective story, but these familiar themes and tropes are diverted from their original purpose and exploited, sometimes disconcertingly, for the pasticheurs' own ends. To open our own investigation into the form, we need first of all to understand what kind of reflection we are dealing with. What exactly is the pastiche reflecting? And how faithfully, or with what distortions, does it do so? In answering these two questions, this chapter aims to offer a substantial overview of what crime fiction pastiche is, and how it relates to the crime genre proper, in order to provide a base for the more specific investigations into theme and structure in the chapters that follow. To begin with, let us broach the subject of genre fiction.

Fredric Jameson defines genres as 'essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact'.¹ He likens genre conventions to the various gestural and linguistic signals which ensure that everyday speech acts are received in the manner intended by the speaker; they alert the receiver to the nature of the communication and prescribe an appropriate response. It is a form of contract to which genre authors bind themselves by raising such expectations in their readers. Certain characters imply certain relationships and milieux, certain premises imply certain thematic developments, certain actions set up certain causal chains of reactions, which may lead to particular denouements. In this way the elements of generic fiction combine to form an internally consistent network, and the law-abiding text is subsumed into the genre, by which process the terms of the contract are themselves reinforced.

What are these textual elements from which genres are constructed? Opposing theoretical approaches to the question are offered by Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss in key texts of formalism and structuralism respectively. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale breaks the tales down into significant actions or 'narrative functions' which can be subsumed into thirty-one basic types. For Propp, these functions are both universal and fundamental to folktales; although not all functions occur in every tale, those that do always happen in the same order, with the consequence that 'all fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure'.² Lévi-Strauss's essay 'La Structure et la forme' criticizes Propp for the diachronic nature of his system, which produces a parallel narrative of functions alongside the narrative it analyses, and interprets it in terms not dissimilar to those of the actual text.³ His own alternative, synchronic methodology is based on sets of oppositions that structure the text, such as male versus female, or high versus low. Lévi-Strauss suggests that by this method Propp's chronological succession could be absorbed into an atemporal, invariable matrix of narrative structure, thus offering a more purely metalinguistic discourse through which to discuss the text.

Although neither Lévi-Strauss nor Propp makes reference to contemporary popular fiction, the ritualized and formulaic nature of the material they study has certain similarities to the modern genre. Alongside articles by Barthes, Genette, and Todorov in the Communications issue that first crystallized structuralist narratology, Umberto Eco contributed a study of Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers which demonstrates the parallels. In 'James Bond: une combinatoire narrative', Eco argues first that Fleming's novels are built around the permutations of fourteen fixed oppositions, such as 'Bond-le Méchant' or 'Perversion-Candeur' [Bond-the Villain; Perversity—Innocence].⁴ He then offers an alternative analysis in terms of the nine narrative 'coups', or moves, into which the novels may, with possible inversions, omissions, and repetitions, be divided, such as 'La Femme joue et se présente à Bond' [The Woman joins the game and introduces herself to Bond] or 'Le Méchant torture Bond (avec ou sans la Femme)' [The Villain tortures Bond (with or without the Woman)].⁵ Eco mentions neither Propp nor Lévi-Strauss with regard to his methods, but the similarities are obvious. Of course, the complex plotting and moral ambiguity of, say, a John Le Carré novel would pose difficulties for the formalist and structuralist systems, but the simple narrative line, the themes of quest and conflict, and the Manichean worldview of the basic thriller form have much in common with the folktale. The architecture of other popular subgenres, such as the classic detective story on the model of Doyle and Gaboriau, obviously comprises very different elements from these, but here too similar analyses might be envisaged to draw out the thematic oppositions (thought-action, reason-passion, etc.) and narrative 'moves' ('evidence examined', 'suspects interrogated', etc.) proper to the form in question. Such a procedure would still not allow us to say that 'all classic detective stories are of one type in regard to their structure', however, since the boundaries between subgenres are determined by the structural criteria used to draw them up; the analysis may give rise to the corpus of texts as much as the corpus inspires the analysis. Nevertheless, the close fit between crime fiction and Lévi-Strauss's and Propp's methods leaves exposed two important aspects of the genre: the similarity between texts, which allows such generalizing approaches, and the formulaic structure, which makes it possible to isolate the same self-contained thematic or narrative components from a number of different texts across the genre.

According to Todorov, the similarity of genre texts may be ascribed to the different value judgment placed upon them by readers, as compared to literary fiction. The latter resists typologies owing to the importance placed upon innovation in the text and the transgression of previous literary boundaries or categories. For the genre text, however, there is virtue in conformity:

Le chef-d'œuvre de la littérature des masses est précisément le livre qui s'inscrit le mieux dans son genre. Le roman policier a ses normes; faire 'mieux' qu'elles ne le demandent, c'est en même temps faire moins bien: qui veut 'embellir' le roman policier, fait de la 'littérature', non du roman policier.⁶

[The masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the book that best fits into its genre. The crime novel has its norms; to 'improve' on their requirements is at the same time to fall short of them: anyone who wishes to 'embellish' the crime novel is writing 'literature', not crime fiction.]

Todorov is concerned to uphold a distinction between literary and popular writing, which, in the following pages, we will find to be rather less clear-cut than he implies. He does not intend to suggest, however, that genre fiction forbids all innovation, which would obviously be a difficult case to make. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, now touchstones of generic orthodoxy, were initially perceived as dangerously iconoclastic in view of the contemporary understanding of the nature of crime fiction. W. H. Auden wrote that Chandler's novels were not detective stories at all, but rather 'serious studies of a criminal milieu'.⁷ Nevertheless, the rotnan noir, like all new additions to the genre, preserves important elements of the generic form, playing with the reader's expectations but never deliberately disappointing the most fundamental of them.

Can there be value in repetitious or formulaic writing? Jameson sees the advent of mass culture and the market economy as having caused the irremediable degeneration of genre-based fiction:

With the elimination of an institutionalized social status for the cultural producer and the opening of the work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications are transformed into a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle. The older generic categories do not, for all that, die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture, transformed into the drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, bestsellers and popular biographies, where they await the resurrection of their immemorial, archetypal resonance at the hands of a Frye or a Bloch.⁸

The language of mass production with which Jameson expresses his disdain has some justification; the mid-twentieth-century explosion of cheaply produced genre novels (and crime fiction is a particularly likely suspect here) can give the impression of churned-out production-line writing, an endless array of indistinguishable clone-novels. Even Chandler is partly in agreement, noting wryly that 'the average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average — or only slightly above average — detective story does'.⁹ In the late 1930s, detective fiction accounted for a quarter of all new novels published in the English language.¹⁰ The sheer size of the crime fiction market ensures that the publishing quality threshold will be lower than for other forms. And since the detective story in particular is an art of subtle variation on a fixed theme, with generic conventions ensuring that even the very best and very worst exemplars of the form will have many features in common, any masterpieces risk getting lost in the ranks.

In search of a champion for genre fiction against such a negative outlook, we can turn once again to Eco. In the essay 'Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics', he argues that the equation of innovation with artistic value is a comparatively recent development in the history of literature. He suggests that the drive for novelty at all costs began with romanticism and was codified in modernist aesthetics, which forgot the classical appreciation of old themes reworked.¹¹ He also suggests that modernist disapproval of contemporary genre fiction stems from a conscious or unconscious relating of literary production 'in series' to the processes of industrial production, which had come to stand as the opposite of artistic invention. In retaliation Eco lists contemporary art forms that arouse critical contempt for their repetitiveness and redundancy, and points out their illustrious high-culture forebears: Shakespeare's canon consists largely of 'remakes' of well-known stories, and Balzac's complex saga has structural parallels to the modern soap opera. For Eco, our current enjoyment of repetitive culture comes from a need for familiarity in an unstable, fast-changing society.¹² He calls for a new aesthetic to replace modernist snobbery with an appreciation of genre fiction's'inseparable knot of scheme-variation'.¹³

The acknowledgement that there can be value in a text quite independent of its originality should lead to a critical rehabilitation of much contemporary popular culture, The model of crime fiction offered by such an approach is also a rather Oulipian one; the text is seen as performing its virtuosities from within the constraints of self-imposed genre limits, not unlike the deliberate alphabetical or structural constraints that Perec used to guide his writing. The 'rules' of crime fiction (the precise nature of which we are about to investigate) define the nature of the game; the skill with which the game is played produces the applause, and, as with any game, it is skill deployed legitimately within the rules that earns respect. The analogy is imperfect in that the rules are not codified, of course, although doomed attempts have been made to do so, nor are they refereed, except by the taste of individual readers, or universally agreed upon by writers. It is this lack of definition that has allowed the gradual development in the norms of the genre, with each new extension of crime fiction's boundaries altering the position of the centre, and modifying our sense of what the genre consists in. To explore further the question of what exactly the genre does comprise, we must now turn to the texts themselves, and let us begin by addressing the issue of where the genre comes from.

The writer with the best claim to have fathered the detective story is without question Edgar Allan Poe. The figure of the detective, aloof analytical superman, and his comparatively obtuse narrator-sidekick, the narrative structure from the presentation of the problem to the sifting of evidence and logical deduction, to the final triumphant solution and restoration of order — all these are present from the beginning, when Poe published his first 'tale of ratiocination' in 1841. Poe's own influences and precursors are various. Arguments have been advanced that the roots of the detective story lie in the .induction from-evidence episode of Voltaire's Zadig (1747), or even as far back as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.¹⁴ Among the form's more direct antecedents are the crime-filled melodramas and the gothic novels popular in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with such proto-detective-stories as William Godwin's The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), E. T. A. Hoffmann's Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819), and the ex-criminal François Eugène Vidocq's Mémoires of his time as the first head of the Sûreté (1829). It is in Poe's work, however, that the genre truly takes shape. His three Dupin tales, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841), 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' (1842-43), and 'The Purloined Letter' (1844), 'anticipate almost every later development in the genre' according to Julian Symons.¹⁵ Poe demonstrates the power of reason by setting it against the apparently impossible in his locked-room mystery, 'The Mur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Reflecting
• 2 Connecting
• 3 Completing
• 4 Evidence
• 5 Reason
• 6 Truth
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index