Detectives 2

        Terry Eagleton defines evil as “the death drive, turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being.” From Eagleton’s perspective, evil represents a hating of life and of self; that hatred is then projected outward. This projected death drive cum evil represents a desire for nothingness, a drive toward our disappearance after having been “savaged by the superego, ravaged by the id, and battered by the external world” The self longs to end its suffering by emptying the self into nothingness. Freud argues that the origin of projection can be found in the attempt to deal with internal excitations that increase displeasures. In order to relieve these tensions cum neuroses the individual treats the displeasures as it was caused by something outside, and therefore they can protect themselves from these displeasures by eliminating the outside either by destroying it or the self. Evil can be understood as a weakness, an inability to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Rather than accept that reality is always an insult, the individual does not learn to live, and rather than commit suicide the self projects its nothingness outward onto others who can be eliminated because they are defined as nothing. Eagleton continues, “Yet, this furious violence involves a kind of lack—an unbearable sense of non-being, which must, so to speak, be taken out on the other.” Rather than eliminate the self, one murders the other. Eagleton offers the words of Milton’s Satan: “Nor hope to be myself less miserable/By what I seek, but others to make such/As I . . . for only in destroying I find ease/To my relentless thoughts.” Now, Iago, too, is evil; the motives behind his actions continue to shift throughout the play. Why Iago incites Othello to jealousy, murder and suicide remains uncertain; throughout the play Iago continually invents motives and explanations for his actions. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Jack enacts evil in his seemingly senseless theft of Piggy’s glasses and finally Piggy’s murder. On the contrary, in Hamlet the motives of King Claudius are crystally clear: he wants the throne and the queen, and he will murder his brother to attain both. He is a very bad man, but I do not think I would not call him evil.

And so it would seem are the murderers in the detective fictions I enjoy. They are bad people but they are not evil. The motives for their deeds are clear and always revealed in the end, and these motives are usually somewhat pedestrian: jealousy, greed, contempt. That so many of these stories take place in non-city environments suggests that there is not in small towns and villages what we citified people imagine a purity, innocence and natural beauty. Rather, in shows like Inspector Lewis, Broadchurch, Inspector Morse, Vera, Brokenwood Mysteries, George Gently, and Midsommer Murders; in the plots in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors and P.D. James’s The Private Patient and The Black Tower, the small towns and villages are rife with the bad. And in these novels and shows it seems that the baddest amongst the suspects and perpetrators are the academics and the wealthy. In this regard I might say that the detective genre can appear even progressive. But there could be no defense against evil.

In the detective stories and shows I enjoy it is not evil on display but the seven deadly sins. In these iterations of the genre the actions of the murderers derive from lapses of self and not from the self’s negation, though perhaps Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs might be described as evil. And interestingly, the final episode of Season 3 for the show, Unforgotten, does hinge on the presence of evil, and the detective Cassie Stuart’s recognition of it horrifies her and she is so horrified by it that she leaves the force. As for myself, I am offended at the presence of the unscrupulous but I am frightened by evil.

                           

 

                            

Detectives 1

When I was thirteen years old and healing from a cosmetic operation I read the complete Sherlock Holmes, a book gifted to me by an acquaintance down the block. Over the course of a week, I devoured it cover to cover, front to back. Holmes fascinated me. He was so very smart. Inquisitive. Autonomous. And except for an occasional hit of cocaine when he was utterly bored and without a case to engage him, he remained completely self-sufficient. From my sick bed I accompanied Holmes and Watson through the streets of London and England’s other regions searching out the criminals and wrestling with his nemesis, Moriarty. I had a few demons myself. At the start of a new adventure, Holmes would delightedly call out, “Come Watson, the game’s afoot,” and we three headed out to play. Probably I enjoyed Holmes’s seeming lack of need for a social world, his fierce independence, and piercing intellect. He solved his cases outside the official police channels; indeed, he eschewed collaboration with them often with derision. And he solved his cases following clues that seemingly only he recognized.

By the age of thirteen I had already become a voracious reader. I would read whatever I could put my mind upon, though then, except for A.C. Doyle and E.A. Poe I did not choose detective stories. In secondary school English was my favorite subject, and if I didn’t always then appreciate the readings, I suspect I must have been imprinted by them because I hold firmly in memory all that I then studied. I do not believe that I sought truth in the texts then, not even sure I knew there was such a thing. I read for the companionship. In my senior year I turned to existentialism and wrote my thesis on the Theater of the Absurd that certainly put a lid on the idea of Truth. Literature had become the game I played. At college I became an English major. I was trained in the discipline of New Criticism, and as a new critic I learned to read closely, studying the significant clues and patterns that would lead me to some conclusion, some meaning, some knowledge of who did it. I followed the words in long sentences, in metaphors, similes, and symbols. There were clues everywhere. 

For the past several years, I have been reading a great many detective novels and watching any number of detective series and shows. At first, I considered that the detective stories were in the moment a distraction from the pandemic and from the stench of politics. For the most part I successfully avoided Trump, the Republicans and Covid (though lately each has returned with an alarming vengeance) and I consumed these texts and shows with an avidity that occupied me for the duration. What game was I playing, I wondered? The detective genre seemed to me not unlike my reading practices: not to follow the plot but to ask questions of the characters and the author of them. I enjoyed these shows. I consumed the detective novels like I did Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. With pleasure and greed. Come Watson, the game’s afoot. I think my experience with the detective genre enhanced my rereading of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In one of the Little Libraries that line the streets I walk I found P.D. James’s detective novel, The Private Patient, and I took it home.

There might be some connection between the work of detectives and the work of readers and literary critics, a connection that might go some way to explain why and how I have become so committed to the detective novel and detective series streaming everywhere. I had myself learned to be a detective seeking out traces and signs in the texts that would lead me to some answer, some recognition of the figure in the carpet: an awareness of my meaning in the work! There was before me in plain view the purloined letter if only I could look properly at it. I had the body—the book—but it was not lying dead the result of a crime, it was not a murdered body, though its presence nevertheless demanded solving. Whatever that activity—solving— might mean! Come, Watson, I called, the game’s afoot. 

Labor Day 2022

For years the arrival of Labor Day signaled the end of summer and foretold the opening of the school year. There were many years when I anticipated these occurrences with eagerness and expectation. Over the years this sense of expectancy had declined and when it finally bottomed out about five years ago I retired from the game. I have not regretted this decision. Though Labor Day will be celebrated on Monday, I do not require a respite from work because contentedly I no longer labor.

Today, nevertheless, Labor Day still means the end of summer and requires adjustments. Whereas for months I awoke with the sun already arisen, today I note that the sun has not yet appeared when I do arise. Though the temperature during these latter days remains high I sense a certain crispness even in the mid-afternoon heat, even though the sensation might occurs only in my imagination. The body remembers. As Labor Day approaches, the daylight declines earlier, the air begins to taste of Fall, and I hear the squirrels scurrying about with increased activity searching for food and materials for the building of their winter nests.. Now, at day’s end the dark descends earlier and earlier, and I know that the Fall colors will soon begin to paper the air and the Fall rains will eventually push the now-wearied leaves from the trees. On Labor Day I begin to organize the books I will read and even study over the Winter.

Though Labor Day also means other things to me now. For example, I can now take my corduroy trousers out of storage. I am happy to do so because I am most comfortable in this clothing style, something having to do with the weight of the material perhaps. After Labor Day I can return to donning long sleeve, even flannel shirts, again the preferred sartorial choice for much of my adult life. Soon, the crispness of the morning air will necessitate closing the bathroom door when I shower so as to hold in the steamy warmth in the room for when I must finally (even regretfully) leave the enclosed, protected space of the stall. To celebrate Labor Day the radio stations to which I subscribe will offer a playlist of songs appropriate for the day,—from Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger, Hazel Dickens, Woody Guthrie, Rosalie Sorrells, and so many more. There will be marches: when I lived in New York I would bicycle down to 59^th Street to attend the Labor Day Parade. I remember one year when the Air Traffic Controllers marched up Fifth Avenue even as Reagan fired them and decertified their Union for striking.

The weather means to deceive me: it is warm and sunny today and will remain so through the weekend. But I am not long fooled. I have enjoyed this summer despite the pandemic and my recent bout with Covid, the wars fought all over the world, the fascistic politics that the Republican Party promulgates, and despite my fears for their takeover of the Congress. I despair the presence of an obviously criminal former President, and the ignorant acceptance by too many millions of his criminal behaviors, despicable lies and repulsive rhetoric. There will arrive a dangerous chill to the air. 

And today I think of lines from a Joni Mitchell song: “I’d like to call back summer time/And have her stay another month or so/But she’s got the urge for going/And I guess she’ll have to go.”