Dreams for Dead Bodies contends that there is a meaningful dialogue be-tween literary works at the far reaches of the detective iction genre and those at its center, a critical discursivity that we might compare to what Rita Felski dubs the “sociability” of a text: “its embedding in numerous networks and its reliance on multiple mediators,” which “is not an attrition, diminu-tion, or co- option of its agency, but the very precondition of it” (“Context”
589). In such cases as “he Gold Bug,” the detective genre is, at best, an ad-jectival property of the text rather than substantive; the story has a detec-tive “accent” and a syntax that is mutually intelligible, if not interchangeable, with “he Musgrave Ritual,” its approximate heir. If, as Felski has suggested,
“works of art can function as vehicles of knowing as well as objects to be known” (587), I contend that texts on the periphery (and the authors who create them) “know” something of the detective genre. Works on the mar-gins that fruitfully incorporate detection’s devices underscore the expedi-ency of its mechanisms for illuminating patterns of interracial sociability and economic interdependencies. My interest in texts like “he Gold Bug,”
then, is not to confer upon them membership in the detective genre, but to emphasize that their value is located in their peripheral or provisional relation to a detective iction canon. his relative distance facilitates an ana-lytical approach by increments, one that takes as its starting point Dupin’s proviso in “Rue Morgue”: “To look at a star by glances— to view it in a sidelong way” permits us “to behold the star distinctly” (105). he efort of indirection produces a “more reined capacity for comprehension,” explains Dupin, than what we might reap from a “scrutiny too sustained, too concen-trated, or too direct” (105– 6).
Accordingly, this study relies on a distinct methodology that empha-sizes the heuristic value of examining “proto- ,” “peripheral,” or “marginal”
genre texts beside detective ictions’ more celebrated catalog. I am inter-ested in contemplating how both standard catalogs and shifting criteria for
“legitimate” genre membership function as conceptual blocks to thinking about the social of occasion of genre. I return to the idea of an anomalous
kinship— not simply an alternative to, antidote for, or respite from the detec-tive genre’s settled genealogy, nor a restoration of its “illegitimate” ofspring and disowned brats, which anyhow seem to be slogging back to the fold and begging for attention. Instead, an anomalous association (signaled by some similarity in the armature of the text) supplies rather diferent conditions for reading than detective ictions long set up in polite society.16 Such texts enable interpretive movement from center to margin and back again: from
“popular” to “literary” texts, and from the peripheries to the core of generic discourse.
Works at the limits of the detective genre, ones that lack the refuge of its systemization and the urgency of its narrative aims (to crack a homicide, for example, or recover a lost object), shed light on the social stakes of particular generic mechanisms. hey are in an unusual position to elucidate concerns of the genre that might be obscured or repressed in key genre texts. “he Gold Bug” is exactly this type of peripheral or proto- detective text, by which I mean it rehearses certain tactics that would become regularly associated with classical detective iction, and it does so to address the psychodynamics of interracial dependency in the antebellum nation. he persistence of pe-ripheral texts as generic expectations took more deinite shape and, even af-ter the genre established a more ixed range of conventions in the last decade of nineteenth century, indicates that detective iction remained a signiicant source of narrative tactics for authors like Mark Twain and Pauline Hop-kins, who were interested in exploring structures of interracial dependency and the potential for interracial sociability.
he sideways methodology I have suggested might seem at odds with the clear- cut rules and ideological intransigency we often associate with formula iction. Franco Moretti, detective iction’s keenest and most cynical (not to say fanatical) detractor, classiies the genre according to the “perennial ixity of the [its] syntax,” designating its framework “a cultural— not a syntactic—
fact,” a mechanism of indoctrination and an ideological assembly line (141).
Moretti consigns mass culture to a category of ideological apparatus that, as Louis Althusser puts it, creates “a subjected being, one who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission” (169). In detective iction, therefore, “what one ‘is’
is completely irrelevant, because the only thing that counts is what the social syntax compels one to do” (Moretti 141). Focusing on the detective igure as arbiter of the law, many critics concur that detective iction is a genre of
“conformism” (Porter 220) consisting of discursive practices that airm the
power of the state to engage in targeted surveillance, naturalize disciplinary tactics, and internalize the law in the consciousness of its audience- subjects.
In the igure of the detective, we ind an individual whose “moral legitimacy”
is never open to question (Porter 125). Holmes’s investigations simply “blind readers” to perforations in what Foucault calls the “carceral texture of soci-ety” (Kayman 240, Foucault 304). Moretti, too, locates the detective in a bourgeois milieu, calling him “the igure of the state in the guise of ‘night watchman’” who intervenes to transform “a situation of semantic ambiguity”
created by a criminal into a narratable event (146). he detective’s “single in-telligence” and “scientiic system” are exercised only to ward of any challenge to the system and not used in service of that system’s advancement (155).
Is this case so easily made? he “syntactic” analysis to which Moretti re-fers deals with constitutive relations in a set of texts and apparently trans-fers from text to social terrain intact; “semantic” approaches to genre, by contrast, group texts according to their common traits (or building blocks), and neither of these categories functions independently (Altman 95– 99).
On the contrary, semantic signals set the stage for syntactic expectations, and any individual utterance, as I have suggested above, has the potential to rewrite the rules of the “grammatical” game (Altman 95– 99, Schatz 20).
Even if we were to restrict a genre whose chief operation is “deautomatizing signiication and making things ‘strange’” (Hühn 455) to some set of inlex-ible rules specially designed to conciliate and compel the reader “to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History” ( Jameson, Political 30), we might occasionally admit regions of textual unease; places where the narra-tive is fractured, labored, or overwrought; and plotlines whose resolution is egregiously implausible and artiicial. In this way, the narrative parts and coniguration of each detective text can be said to paraphrase or parse its cognition of the social, the structure and style together indicating something more complex than the “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” the text proposes through its inal elucidation of the puzzle element (Althusser 162).17
My emphasis throughout is that the genre’s mechanisms do not easily and never necessarily resolve into the thrill- producing machine that regales its passive spectator. Charles Rzepka’s distinction between detective iction and the subgenre of detection is especially helpful in this regard: while the former merely features a detective among its characters, the latter is less vested in majestic displays of inductive prowess and stresses instead “the
in-citement and prolonging of inductive activity in the reader” (17). he formal apparatus of this last class of texts, which cultivate engagement in the reader, is the focus of this study. Detection invites its audience to construct specula-tive accounts to clear up the crime; it expects its reader will trace the param-eters of plausible fact before capitulating in the last part to some far- fetched solution or likely card it has long kept up its sleeve. he point worth pressing is that if detectives are not merely heroic protagonists or model readers but the reader’s intellectual adversaries, each instance of detective iction enacts its proper theory of ideology, not by way of a staunch interpellation but by recruiting its reader to a delicate process of negotiations, coaxing them to concur with its particular image of reality. Rather than representing an exemplary exercise in “lowbrow” literary diversion, the techniques mobilized to dismantle the enigma within the detective text constitute a correspon-dence course in social logic. Accordingly, the reader’s pleasure is precisely her appreciation of the formal means by which the social ends are achieved, at least “when the genre’s literary self- awareness forms the starting point of analysis” (Pyrhönen, “Criticism” 45).
Additionally, while I am particularly attuned to the inventory of de-tection’s narrative tools I describe in the irst part of the introduction, in this study, I also attempt to honor recent developments in the study of the detective genre that have resuscitated critical attention to the infusion of gothic, supernatural, pseudoscientiic, and surreal elements in detective ic-tions, despite the genre’s long- standing associations with Enlightenment ra-tionalism and scientiic inquiry.18 Indeed, spiritualisms and pseudoscientiic epistemologies turn up continually in detective ictions of the nineteenth century, where they regularly facilitate criminal investigations in conjunc-tion with forensic technologies. Dime- novels embroidered the larger- than- life adventures and shape- shifting talents of detectives rather than their intellectual rigor, and though the sleuths in detective ictions like Metta Fulla Victor’s he Dead Letter (1866) and Anna Katherine Green’s he Leav-enworth Case (1878) valiantly stalked their culprits, their authors’ formulated a set of competencies for the detective that included, in addition to intermit-tent bouts of inference and deduction, surveillance, psychic intuition, eaves-dropping, hypnotism, chirography, and pure luck. Ron homas points out, furthermore, that those detective stories that fantasized new mechanisms of social control and dreamed up a formidable forensic science occasion-ally predicted methods that the police would come to adopt long before the technology necessary to implement those methods existed (4). In some of
the stories I examine, the fantastic and forensic fuse in the production of racial knowledge and the ratiocinative mixes with the “irrational” in depic-tions of production. From the transmigration of the soul in Robert M. Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself to invisible strikebreakers in Mark Twain’s No. 44, he Mysterious Stranger; from hypnosis, mesmerism, and psychic intelligence in William H. Holcombe’s A Mystery of New Orleans to Frimbo, the Ivy League graduate who proposes he can change patterns of cause and efect in Rudolph Fisher’s he Conjure- Man Dies, magical and pseudoscien-tiic elements raise questions about individual will and autonomy, blurring boundaries between self and other, and so play a vital role in scripting in-terracial sociability and dependency in peripheral detective ictions. Rather than portray these magical phenomena as antagonistic to the genre’s inner workings, I explicate whether and how these eccentric modes of detection furnish complementary varieties of analytical engagement.
he prolonged development of detective iction, whose irst appearances most critics date to the 1840s but whose golden era appeared nearly a centu-ry later, can also help to clarify how we might productively relate this analy-sis of the detective genre to the cultural strands of an American modernity, whose most celebrated literary products appeared in the irst few decades of the twentieth century. Whether we describe literary modernism as the “aes-thetic articulation” of the peculiar and ethnically individuated experience of modernity (characterized especially by the unprecedented scale of industri-alization and the advent of technologies that agitated experiences of sound, space, and time) (Scandura and hurston 11); as a stylistic engagement with anxieties about governance, mass democratization, and the drama of mod-ern political consent (Chu 28– 29); or as an art that relects the “historically original problem” of the metropolis that cannot sustain self- suiciency, which struggles to imagine a “self- subsisting totality” but remains neverthe-less “radically incomplete” ( Jameson, “Modernism” 58), it is certainly the case that peripheral detective ictions, as I have presented them here, engage with modernist aesthetics.19
he genre’s modernist impulse becomes even clearer, however, if we re-frame our inventory of genre elements to emphasize detection iction’s atten-tion to failures of ocular omniscience and articulaatten-tions of temporal displace-ment, the volatility of identity, the partial or limited eicacy of contiguity and metonymy as instruments of perception, and the elision of analeptic and proleptic possibilities that the narrative has itself generated. Its range of formal devices is as attuned to the discontinuities and degradations of
modernity as the prospects for psychic coherence and political recognition it ofers. In examining peripheral and “canonical” detection ictions in this way, as “self- relexive textual enigma[s],” literary works “about readability and intelligibility” (Pyrhönen, “Criticism” 54), rather than as quasi- realist depic-tions of a rational, mechanistic world, Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that American authors crafted and exploited detection’s devices to map conigurations of interracial sociability. Accordingly, I argue not only that the emergence of detective iction is entangled with the inception of a cul-tural modernity in the United States, but also that this culcul-tural modernity was grounded in an antebellum coniguration of social and economic forces whose psychodynamic terms persisted long afterward. In other words, de-tection texts take us to an American modernity that corresponds to the long nineteenth century.
Undertaking any critical project about detective iction no doubt brings to mind the work of the detective himself. As Felski and others have noted, the critic and the detective share the impulse to “track down and bring to light obscured patterns of causality” by way of an investigation designed to reconstruct past events (“Suspicious” 225). More than simply identifying the genius of literary texts, or highlighting the structural faults and supericial imperfections of each in its own right, the critic longs to ascertain how his-torical forces ind their way into the literary text, whether texts battle con-texts, or give birth to them (225). My own part in this project is, admittedly, not so diferent from the literary sleuth, though I might add that most of the works I investigate demand close scrutiny and, given their use of self- referential discourse, continually relect on the engagement cultivated by the reading process and the ideological force of writing itself— which is to say, they are interested in the kind of detecting that texts and their readers can do together.
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