#23B. Intermission
What happened next?
Hi all!
Work has completely and unreasonably eaten my life this weekend, so once again I have neglected you. However, I thought I would share a little.
Over the past year or so I’ve become very interested in detectives. It was sparked by a reasonably deep engagement with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, but actually my interest goes back even further. One of my favourite novels, Gadda’s That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana is about a detective. The emoji I most-often use for myself is 🕵🏻♀️. I often wear a trench coat. I love Humphrey Bogart, especially as a detective. My father spends a great deal of time with TV detectives, and much of the time I spend with him is also with these detectives.
I sparked myself again this weekend indulging my guilty secret of watching youtube videos about men who play videogames. This guy was digging deeper than usual into violent videogames, how overused the form is, and I suddenly realised how arbitrary it is that videogames are so often about violent conflict.
Except, of course, it’s not arbitrary. There is something about videogames that lends itself to featuring violent conflict. And so now I wonder — why do detectives show up so much?
Detectives play almost no part in daily life. I suspect most people live and die without ever encountering a detective. And yet detectives are a huge figure in media, particularly literature and film. Why? Why not airline pilots, teachers, taxi drivers, even managers!
Here’s an excerpt from That Awful Mess:
In his wisdom and in his Molisan poverty, Officer Ingravallo, who seemed to live on silence and sleep under the black jungle of that mop, shiny as pitch and curly as astrakhan lamb, in his wisdom, he sometimes interrupted this silence and this sleep to enunciate some theoretical idea (a general idea, that is) on the affairs of men, and of women. At first sight, or rather, on first hearing, these seemed banalities. They weren’t banalities. And so, those rapid declarations, which crackled on his lips like the sudden illumination of a sulphur match, were revived in the ears of people at a distance of hours, or of months, from their enunciation: as if after a mysterious period of incubation. “That’s right!” the person in question admitted, “That’s exactly what Ingravallo said to me.” He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. He also used words like knot or tangle, or muddle, or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein. But the legal term, “the motive, the motives”, escaped his lips by preference, though as if against his will. The opinion that we must “reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of cause”, as handed down by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replace cause with causes was for him a central, persistent opinion, almost a fixation, which melted from his fleshy, but rather white lips, where the stub of a spent cigarette seemed, dangling from one corner, to accompany the somnolence of his gaze and the quasi-grin, half-bitter, half-skeptical, in which through ‘old’ habit he would fix the lower half of his face beneath that sleep of his forehead and eyelids and that pitchy black of his mop. This was how, exactly how he defined ‘his’ crimes. “When they call me… Sure. If they call me, you can be sure that there’s trouble: some mess, some gliuommero to untangle”, he would say, garbling his Italian with the dialects of Naples and the Molise.
The apparent motive, the principal motive was, of course, single. But the crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown on it in a whirlwind (like the sixteen winds in the list of winds when they twist together in a tornado, in a cyclonic depression) and had ended by pressing into the vortex of the crime the enfeebled reason of the world. Like wringing the neck of a chicken. And then he used to say, but this a bit wearily, “you’re sure to find skirts where you don’t want to find them” A belated Italian revision of the trite cherchez la femme. And then he seemed to repent, as if he had slandered the ladies, and wanted to change his mind. But that would have got him into difficulties. So he would remain silent and pensive, afraid he had said too much. What he meant was that a certain affective motive, a certain amount or, as you might say today, a quantum of affection, of eros, was also involved even in matters of interest, in crimes which were apparently far removed from the tempests of love. Some colleagues, a tiny bit envious of his intuitions, a few priests, more acquainted with the many evils of our time, some subalterns, clerks, and his superiors too, insisted he read strange books: from which he drew all those words that mean nothing, or almost nothing, but which serve better than others to dazzle the naive, the ignorant. His terminology was for doctors in looneybins. But practical action takes something else! Notions and philosophizing are to be left to scribblers: the practical experience of the police stations and the homicide squad is quite another thing: it takes plenty of patience, and charity, and a strong stomach; and when the whole shooting match of the Italians isn’t tottering, a sense of responsibility, prompt decision, civil moderation; yes, yes, and a firm hand. On him, on Don Ciccio, these objections, just as they were, had no effect; he continued to sleep on his feet, philosophize on an empty stomach, and pretend to smoke his half-cigarette which had, always, gone out.
Mulling this, let’s consider some rivals of the detective. Doctors, explorers, secret agents. It seems like some professions have narrative structure built into them — motivation, conflict, transformation, resolution. They also have the time and inclination to pursue these narratives — whereas airline pilots are at some point going to have to get back on the plane, detectives and doctors pursue their narratives to their conclusion (in fantasy, anyway). Another example of this is the ‘drifter’ archetype, often fulfilled by teenagers of twentysomethings without much to do but pursue plot.
These are also very social occupations, and as such they function as framing devices. Doctors curate and drive the stories of others — this is why House can produce so many stories, because ultimately they are about other people. Contrast this with The Simpsons, which has to go to much more effort to create new narratives.
Finally (for now), the detective is particularly powerful as she is also a reader. While the reader reads the story, wonders about what comes next, tries to piece things together, to untangle, the detective is the reader’s avatar in the fictional world. She can go anywhere, talk to anyone, has the ultimate literary superpower of inquiry. She does what the reader might do, if he were smarter, stronger, more socially competent, and most profoundly — if he had more dramatic challenges in his own life, rather than the mundane ones his day-job is designed to provide.
Which, while disappointing, is perhaps for the best. Unless you really are a detective — maybe then you just watch Gogglebox.
Kay