Mysteries and Conspiracies

Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies

Luc Boltanski, Luc Boltanski

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745664057
  9780745664040
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745683447
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it.

The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

— 1 —

REALITY VERSUS REALITY

The London meanderings of Aristide Valentin

‘The Blue Cross’ is the first story in The Innocence of Father Brown, which is in turn the first of five collections of detective stories published by G. K. Chesterton between 1911 and 1935 (Chesterton 1994). Father Brown, the detective hero of these tales, is a Catholic priest, small in stature and quite ordinary in appearance. He faces a superb criminal: Flambeau. French by birth but worldwide in scope, a brilliant artist of crime, Flambeau is wanted by the police in at least three major European countries. At least, this is the case in the early stories; later, Father Brown manages to ‘turn’ Flambeau and make him an invaluable collaborator. Together they solve mysteries that arise like shooting stars from the ether in the earth’s atmosphere, repeatedly penetrate our world and disrupt its seemingly stable and orderly arrangement of reality.

When ‘The Blue Cross’ begins, a French detective, Aristide Valentin, has gone to England to track down Flambeau, about whom he knows nothing except that he too has crossed the Channel. Valentin is French to the core, thus devoted to reason. But as he has a good understanding of how reason works, he is not unaware of its limits, and he knows that there are circumstances when reason requires us to pay the closest attention precisely to what seems to elude it. On this occasion, Valentin has no trail to follow. All possible paths of investigation are open to him; he has no reason to prefer one to another. Not only does Valentin not know where Flambeau is, he does not even know what has drawn his quarry to London: a criminal enterprise, inevitably, one for which Flambeau has devised a plan, but there is no reason to suppose that the deed has already been done. Valentin thus opts for an approach that consists in paying attention to minuscule events that seem senseless and thereby take on the character of mysteries.

In the opening sequence of ‘The Blue Cross’, Valentin meanders about the streets of London, not seeking clues (as Sherlock Holmes does), since he does not even know the nature of the criminal deeds towards which certain particular arrangements might point; if he knew, he could establish a referential relation between these arrangements and the deeds themselves. He simply pays close attention to every event that has the character of a mystery, in the sense I have just given this term. A first mystery: he goes into a restaurant for breakfast – it is a tranquil, simple place with old-fashioned charm – and orders coffee and a poached egg. As he is about to put sugar in his coffee, he is astonished to find that the sugar bowl does not contain granulated sugar, as he expected, but salt. When he proceeds to examine the salt shaker, he observes that it is full of sugar. He summons the waiter, who acknowledges the oddity and attributes it to two priests, one tall and one short, both calm and respectable, who had had soup at that very table a short time before. Why this attribution? Because, the waiter explains, while one of the two priests behaved normally (he paid the bill and left), the other lingered a moment and (second mystery) grabbed his cup of soup and tossed its contents against the wall.

Valentin, continuing his random pursuit, comes across a display of fruit in a grocery-shop window: oranges and nuts. Now (third mystery), on the pile of nuts there is a sign indicating ‘premium tangerines, twopence’, and on the pile of oranges, ‘top selection of Brazil nuts’. Under questioning, the enraged merchant answers that two priests had come by and that one of them had (fourth mystery) deliberately overturned the basket of oranges. Valentin then speaks to a policeman standing across the street and asks him if by any chance he has come across two priests. The policeman answers that they had climbed aboard a yellow bus and that one of them appeared drunk (which constitutes a fifth mystery, priests not being the sort of individuals one generally expects to see strolling inebriated about the streets in the morning). Valentin in turn takes a yellow bus and sits on the top deck. After a while, the bus passes a pub with a broken front window, looking as if it had been deliberately smashed (sixth mystery). The owner, when questioned, tells him that this misdeed was committed by two men in black. When it was time to pay the bill, one of the two had given him a sum three times higher than the price of the meals consumed. ‘It’s for what I’m about to break’, the man said, whereupon he used his umbrella to break the glass. Finally (seventh and last mystery), a woman encountered in a charming sweetshop tells Valentin about a package that a priest gave her, asking her to send it to a certain address. By tracking this package, Valentin puts himself on the trail of the still unknown criminal and crime that justify his own presence in London.

How to understand ‘mysteries’

Aristide Valentin’s ramblings through the streets of London, where he lets himself be guided by a series of mysteries, give us a first indication of how this term is to be understood. A mystery arises from an event, however unimportant it may seem, that stands out in some way against a background – to borrow terms from the psychology of form – or against the traces of a past event, not witnessed by the narrator, that remain perceptible later on. This background is thus constituted by ordinary understandings as we know them through the intermediary of authorities (educational in particular) and/or through experience; the latter gives actions a relatively predictable character, especially by associating them with habits. A mystery is thus a singularity (since every event is a singularity) but one whose character can be called abnormal, one that breaks with the way things present themselves under conditions that we take to be normal, so that our minds do not manage to fit the uncanny event into ordinary reality. The mystery thus leaves a kind of scratch on the seamless fabric of reality. In this sense – to return to concepts introduced in On Critique – a mystery can be said to be the result of an irruption of the world in the heart of reality (Boltanski 2011 [2009]: 57–9).¹

By the world, I mean ‘everything that happens’ – to borrow Wittgenstein’s formulation – and even everything that might possibly happen – an ‘everything’ that cannot be fully known and mastered. Conversely, reality is stabilized by pre-established formats that are sustained by institutions, formats that often have a legal or paralegal character, at least in western societies. These formats constitute a semantics that expresses the whatness of what is; they establish qualifications, define entities and trials (in the sense in which the term ‘trial’ is used in On Justification [Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 (1991)]), and determine the relations that must be maintained between entities and trials or tests if these are to have an acceptable character. In this way, reality is presented as a network of causal relations that holds together the events with which experience is confronted. Reference to these relations makes it possible to give meaning to the events that are produced by identifying the entities to which these events must be attributed.²

These causal relations are thus tacitly recognized in general as unproblematic, so that it does not seem necessary to verify them, to establish proofs for them – or at least it does not seem necessary to push the investigation beyond the boundaries that have been set up by habit and also by the trust placed in the validity of the established formats. Especially when the causality in question has a social dimension, this trust is based on agencies that guarantee the regular attribution of events to pre-defined entities – among which, in the modern era, legal and governmental agencies play a preponderant role. We shall see later on that law can be considered as one of the principal social arrangements used to establish and maintain these attributions.

Unlike events that can be qualified as ordinary, an event possesses an enigmatic or mysterious character when it escapes the normal attributions of a specific entity (there is no valid reason for a waiter to put sugar in a salt shaker) or when the nature of the entity to which it can be attributed is unknown. Thus a mysterious event may well have an immediate signification (a certain building has collapsed), in the sense that the change of state affecting the situation in which it intervenes can be described in a way that relies on generally accepted physical data (if the building had risen into the sky, it would have been called a ‘miracle’). But one can say that the event does not have a meaning as long as it has not been possible to attribute it to a given entity or, when that entity is already known, to determine that entity’s intentions. The event, as a singularity, thus takes on full meaning only by being related to an entity credited with an identity, a certain stability across time, and an intentionality – whether this latter is manifested, or not, by way of a conscious act.³ A given building has collapsed. This is a ‘fact’. But to give the event a meaning, we have to be in a position to identify the entity to which it can be attributed as well as the reasons behind it. Must the cause of the collapse be imputed to an earthquake? A design flaw? A construction defect on the part of the builder (who used inferior materials to save money, for example)? To an illegal manoeuvre on the part of the owner so he could get the insurance money? To a criminal who sought to cover up the murder he had just committed? To a bomb set off by a terrorist (and, in that case, what were his real intentions, and is it truly appropriate to call him a terrorist)? We shall come back to these notions in more detail later on.

Detective stories vs. fantastic tales and picaresque novels

Detective stories, as a genre, set forth mysteries and their solutions. Stories of this form begin with an event and work back towards its causes.⁴ The formation of this literary genre thus entails a certain number of presuppositions about reality. Indeed, it has been observed that an enigma can only stand out against the background of a stabilized reality. Detective stories are based, more precisely, on two presuppositions that distinguish this genre from its predecessors: tales, especially fantastic tales, on the one hand, and, on the other, novels that can be called ‘picaresque’, in a succinct designation of a narrative orientation that originated in Spain and developed in quite diverse forms in French and English literature.⁵

Detective stories are distinct from tales, whether miraculous or fantastic, to the extent that they bank on the existence of a reality known as ‘natural’, that is, on the type of causal linkages that the ‘natural’ sciences establish. The association between the narrative logic of detective stories and scientific logic was central to the earliest analyses of this genre (Messac 1975 [1929]). Detective stories could not exist without a clearly established dividing line between natural reality and the world known as supernatural. If gods or spirits can modify reality according to their whims, and if we cannot know their intentions, then reality does not possess the necessary stability for mysteries to stand out in a salient way against the background formed by the normal course of events. In detective stories and also, of course, in spy stories, there are no references to supernatural beings, such as ghosts, and this absence marks the difference between the two literary genres we are considering, on the one hand, and so-called fantastic tales, on the other. To be sure, in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century there are many narratives associated with the fantastic genre that do not refer directly to the intervention of supernatural beings, or to anything magical, but that seek to arouse anxiety and unease in the reader by depicting ordinary situations in terms apt to bring out their strangeness (Todorov 1973). But this device, particularly evident in Guy de Maupassant’s fantastic realism, aims to look on all reality as tinged with an anxiety-producing uncanniness, often by presenting it as it might appear to a subject afflicted with mental illness. Now, this literary approach, too, excludes the possibility of establishing a detective-story intrigue. For if reality as a whole takes on an enigmatic form and is tilted towards the impossible and the incomprehensible, then the singularities on which mystery-based novels rely (singularities that the investigator’s job is to explain) are swallowed up in a framework that no longer allows the ordinary to be distinguished from the extraordinary, the interpretable from the inconceivable.

The work of Edgar Allen Poe, who was both a master of the fantastic genre and the inventor of the detective story,⁶ allows us to distinguish clearly between these two genres. Paranormal phenomena are not excluded from Poe’s fantastic tales. But such phenomena never come into play in those that prefigure the detective story. Similarly, while Arthur Conan Doyle was a devoted practitioner of spiritiualism in his private life and even wrote a history of the practice (Doyle 1926),⁷ he excluded supernatural and paranormal elements from the detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. These narratives do not incorporate any events apt to transgress the causal modalities that we customarily ascribe, in western societies, to ‘natural laws’. And while certain characters may initially evoke such phenomena – ghostly appearances, doors that open or close without human or mechanical intervention, and so on – the inquiry always ends up giving them a natural explanation, or attributing them to manoeuvres designed to deceive the story’s protagonists (and by the same token its readers).

This restriction clearly does not apply to Doyle’s many fantastic tales. Let us compare, for example, two stories that both include the mysterious appearance of a monster. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a detective story, readers are first allowed to believe that the huge beast terrifying the villagers is of paranormal origin. But this irrational belief is disproved by Sherlock Holmes’s investigation. The irrational has a rational outcome. In ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, a fantastic tale, rational arguments are invoked at the beginning of the story, but they are belied by subsequent events. The inhabitants of a remote mountain village in England also believe in the existence of a terrifying monster. The narrator, ‘a man of a sober and scientific turn of mind, absolutely devoid of imagination’, is scornful at first of these ‘old wives’ tales’ and tries to find a rational explanation for the strange phenomena reported by the locals (the inexplicable disappearance of sheep on moonless nights), before finding himself in the presence of a monster from the bowels of the earth whose victim he becomes in turn (Doyle 1977: 69).

A second presupposition concerns the social world. If the mysteries on which detective stories hinge are to stand out sharply against the background of reality, reality has to be consistent not only with natural ‘laws’ but also with social regularities. This is what distinguishes detective stories from picaresque narratives. Both genres belong to the vast domain of adventure stories. A detective story includes characters who have ‘adventures’; it strings together incidents, reversals, dramatic turns of events, and so on. But, unlike picaresque tales, detective stories bank on a reality whose lineaments and linkages offer a basis for predictable anticipations, and the enigma stands out against the background of this stabilized social reality.

In a picaresque novel, ‘adventures are juxtaposed without benefit of causal relations’, in ‘a world that has nothing to offer but chance,’ and where ‘fragmentation and contingency’ rule (Pavel 2003: 101, 106). Let us take, for example (to remain within the confines of French literature), Alain René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane (1886 [1715–1735]), inspired by early seventeenth-century Spanish literature, or Voltaire’s Candide (2005 [1759]), which can be seen as a late, parodic expression of picaresque narrative. In these texts, as in the classic works of the genre, stress is placed on the more or less chaotic nature of the various milieus in which the characters and, with them, all human beings are immersed, no matter when or where they live out their earthly lives. According to the conceptions presented in such works, human beings are above all playthings of circumstances, welcome or unwelcome. These circumstances are always local, in terms of space and time. Each moment in every place is thus characterized by a certain combination of circumstances on which the protagonist’s situation depends in the ‘here and now’. But once a given situation is resolved, especially an unwelcome situation from which the character seeks to escape, he or she is thrust into another situation, equally singular (and often no more welcome). Life’s unfolding is thus comparable to a series of ‘throws’ – as in throws of dice – that is not governed by any principle of general causality but depends rather on whim or chance (the latter term is used here in its trivial sense to designate absolute unpredictability, and not in the probabilist sense it has been given by mathematicians after Pascal). The picaresque novel not only sets aside the picture of an ordered reality, it even excludes any reference to a hidden principle of order – whether this might involve divine providence, historical determination, or objective laws governing society – that would make it possible to give meaning to events that no individual person has planned or even desired. A rational construction of moral life, like the one Adam Smith, inspired by Newton, developed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (2002 [1759]), is at the opposite extreme from the picaresque novel, in which it is impossible to distinguish the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’ (and it was precisely to mock efforts to establish a simultaneously providential and rational moral order that Voltaire wrote Candide). The picaresque tale, starting with the novella first published anonymously in Burgos that came to be regarded as the prototype of the genre (Life of Lazarillo de Tormes 2000 [1554]), makes malice, lies and trickery the very principles of human behaviour and the driving forces behind stories that proceed in erratic ways. But this sort of dark realism excludes the possibility of a stabilized reality, since the motives for action are entirely unpredictable. What is more, the representation of reality is laid out on a single plane, the one that links the fleeting intrigues fomented by trickery; this structure not only excludes the reference to parallel levels of reality that is needed to set up a detective story, it also rules out any staging of the ambivalence – inasmuch as ambivalence is distinguished, precisely, from lies – that will constitute one of the major themes of the modern novel.

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Reality versus Reality
• 2 The Inquiries of a London Detective
• 3 The Inquiries of a Paris Policeman
• 4 Identifying Secret Agents
• 5 The Endless Inquiries of ‘Paranoids’
• 6 Regulating Sociological Inquiry
• Epilogue: And History Copied Literature
• Notes
• References
• Index