Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction

citizenship, gender and ethnicity

Anne Grydehøj

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers a study of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and French crime fictions covering a fifty-year period. From 1965 to the present, both Scandinavian and French societies have undergone significant transformations. Twelve literary case studies examine how crime fictions in the respective contexts have responded to shifting social realities, which have in turn played a part in transforming the generic codes and conventions of the crime novel. At the centre of the book's analysis is crime fiction's negotiation of the French model of Republican universalism and the Scandinavian welfare state, both of which were routinely characterised as being in a state of crisis at the end of the twentieth century. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book investigates the interplay between contemporary Scandinavian and French crime narratives, considering their engagement with the relationship of the state and the citizen, and notably with identity issues (class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in particular).

PART I

The Structure of Crime Fiction Revolutions

1

Social and Literary Models in Crisis

Introduction

In 1967 Swedish journalist and writer Per Wahlöö (1926–75) explained in an essay the aim of the crime fiction novels he was then in the process of writing with his wife Maj Sjöwall (1935–2020):

We … had this special idea together: to use the crime novel in its pure form as a scalpel to slit open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type … to simply find out where the responsibility was for what and if there was, indeed, anything to be responsible for.¹

The use of the crime novel as a means of dissecting society and formulating social critique was unprecedented in Sweden at the time when Wahlöö was writing. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s critical engagement with the Swedish welfare state as presented in their police procedurals not only challenges the contemporary political consensus; it is also intertwined with a rewriting of the generic conventions of crime fiction. This rewriting advances questions about literature’s role in society.

A parallel literary movement of politicised leftist crime writing sees the light in France with the post-May 1968 néo-polar. Its founder, Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–95), likewise establishes ‘une écriture au scalpel’, a ‘scalpel’-based, implicitly surgical form of writing, setting forth concerns about advanced capitalism, consumer society and political organisation within the French Republic while simultaneously contesting the formulaic structures and para-literary position of the genre.²

This chapter investigates the emergence of the socially and politically engaged crime novel in Scandinavia – specifically in Sweden – and France in the 1960s and early 1970s through readings of novels by Sjöwall/Wahlöö and by Manchette. It considers these novels as articulations of – and responses to – particular socio-political paradigms in their respective national contexts. One unifying theme dominating these writings is the turn from viewing crime as an expression of an individual aberration to understanding crime as a manifestation of a societal malaise. Rather than staging the detective in the role of protector of a social order that is disturbed by the individual and aberrant malefactor, the néo-polar and its Swedish counterpart set out to investigate the constellations and dynamics of power and to problematise the political status quo. This implies a persistent interrogation of the prevailing polity and its institutions – the Fifth Republic in the case of Manchette, and the post-war social-democratic welfare state in the case of Sjöwall/Wahlöö. This evolves in the fictional narratives in both cultural contexts into investigations of the state as an inherently criminal institution offering protection only to those who fully comply with its rationale. Thematically, the writers focus on processes within state institutions, predominantly the legal system, the police and the political establishment, as well as on the ways in which the press often colludes with the police and political interests.

However, before the analysis turns towards the fictional texts themselves, the status of these almost simultaneous literary occurrences will be contextualised within the history of modern crime fiction narratives. After a brief discussion of how the genre has shifted and developed to embrace different sociocultural stages of modernity, this section thus situates the writings of Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Manchette as pivotal literary events – and generic turning points – in their French and Swedish contexts. These writings announce the advent of a new category of crime fiction that is critically engaged on multiple fronts.

The crime fiction genre as modern form

Detective fiction emerges in the mid-nineteenth century and develops in close relationship with industrialisation, technological progress, colonialism, urbanisation, capitalism and the bourgeoisie as ruling class. In other words, it develops alongside modernity itself. As well as accompanying, reflecting and charting societal changes, detective fiction also, as Ernest Mandel remarks, surfaces at ‘a particular stage of the evolution of literature’.³ If Charles Baudelaire is celebrated for his radical conceptualisation of modernity in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (The painter of modern life, 1863) and for his characterisation of it as a condition rooted in the constantly shifting individual temperament’s relationship to the similarly mobile environment, that is, as a social condition, it is unsurprising that he should also be the translator and advocate of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories for a French audience.⁴ Poe’s short stories ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) are published in Baudelaire’s translation in 1856.⁵ These stories are generally considered as the texts establishing the genre of modern crime fiction and can be viewed as a transitional literary manifestation at the crossroads between the pre-modern and the modern.⁶ As Kim Toft Hansen notes, ‘“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” materialises a condensed format of the Western rational modern detective story.’⁷ Toft Hansen further characterises Poe in the following terms:

Directionally, Poe builds a literary bridge between past and future, between a metaphysical sensibility [Romanticism] and a rational frame of mind [Modernity] which does not unerringly make him the father of crime fiction, but a hub of attention passing on erstwhile historical roots.⁸

In his analysis of the association between modernity and crime fiction, Jacques Dubois emphasises capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie as the conditions upon which the genre establishes itself. Dubois also highlights the three colonial powers France, Britain and the United States as the genre’s birthplaces: ‘The genre is born in three countries in which liberal capitalism is shaking up the old world and creating the conditions for the emergence of a new culture that establishes its coherence straight away and is still ours.’⁹

Linking the surfacing of the detective novel to the paradigmatic shift from ‘the old world’ to modernity suggests that other and later significant shifts from one era to another might also have an impact upon the genre’s essential features. Therefore, it is productive to investigate the modern crime fiction narrative as a transitional, pivotal literary form in relation to later mutations of the genre, which frequently appear at historically critical moments when societies are in rapid transformation. Accordingly, Ernest Mandel points to another significant sociocultural shift in America in the 1920s and 1930s, coinciding with the emergence of the hard-boiled novel. He argues in Delightful Murder (1984) that whereas crime fiction in its early nineteenth-century manifestations mirrored ‘the rising need of the bourgeoisie to defend rather than attack the social order’, the genre in the interwar period ‘represented a typical transitional phenomenon’, signalling a shift in focus from a systemic defence to a systemic critique:

This evolution of the crime story, of course, means that it can no longer function as a literary genre helping to persuade its readers to accept the legitimacy of bourgeois society. Its integrative function has declined, and it has actually become disintegrative with respect to that society.¹⁰

This shift from an ‘integrative’ function for the crime story, that is, one supportive of the social order and of its restoration, to a ‘disintegrative’ function – one of critique – is a significant marker for twentieth-century crime fiction, and one that coincides, moreover, with radical shifts in the economic and cultural bases of society.

The present chapter’s rationale, then, is that certain crime fiction narratives in the 1960s and 1970s – in this case, Sjöwall/Wahlöö’s and Manchette’s – represent yet another turning point in the genre, linked in turn to a shifting of socio-historical tectonic plates moving at the moment when these authors are producing their texts. In the same manner that detective fiction materialises as a literary companion to modernity in the nineteenth century, these crime fictions, it is argued, surface as a response to the paradigm of postmodernity in its early manifestation. Likewise, rather as postmodernity is both continuous and discontinuous with earlier phases of modernity, the rewriting of the genre that begins during the mid-1960s and early 1970s offers form and content that are both analogous to and disparate from previous variants of the genre. From its inception in the nineteenth century, the crime fiction genre is anchored to modernity, and develops in close connection with modernity through the twentieth century, as industrialisation, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, socialism, along with modernity itself, become increasingly associated with the ‘post-’ prefix.

The title of this book’s first part alludes to Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which argues against viewing history in terms of a ‘development-by-accumulation’ or a ‘process of accretion’.¹¹ Instead Kuhn argues for viewing the development of science as the result of scientific revolutions, described as ‘the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science’.¹² The development of the crime fiction genre is here considered from a similar perspective, from which new generic occurrences are viewed as expressions of paradigmatic shifts linked to contingent literary and socio-historical turning points. This evolution of the crime fiction genre as one undergoing periodic yet ‘nonaccumulative’ revolutions thus takes account of the genre’s emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, the appearance of the hard-boiled detective fiction in 1920–1930s’ America, Sjöwall/Wahlöö’s welfare-state crime fiction and Manchette’s néo-polar in the 1960–1970s, and also of the historical contingency of these developments. These literary turning points can be viewed as generic revolutions bound to socio-historical critical moments where the genre’s predilection for dealing with societal transformation is particularly accentuated.

The theme of social transformation is reinforced by the genre’s particular thematic preoccupation with topographical/territorial infrastructure. Paris in the 1840s–1850s, Los Angeles in the 1930s–1940s and European metropoles (including Paris and Stockholm) in the 1960s–1970s are all characterised by radically new infrastructural environments, and these are central to crime fiction’s engagement with the respective societies in which they are produced. The changing metropolis as a site of existential alienation found in Baudelaire’s and Poe’s Parisian boulevards and in the ‘mean streets’ of the Chandleresque noir are paralleled in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s depiction of Stockholm, where, for Bergman, ‘urban spaces … represent the disintegrating Swedish welfare state, and the changes that the city is going through, physical reconstruction as well as social degradation, are presented as the result of capitalism, corruption and greed’.¹³ In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, new architectural features and a changing cityscape resulting from urban planning executed to the benefit of business interests expose the degeneration of Swedish society, where the sense of community found in the old residential neighbourhoods disappears to make room for new, dehumanising concrete buildings erected for big corporations ‘to achieve the fullest possible exploitation of valuable land’.¹⁴ The reshaping of the city is directly linked to social degradation: ‘Behind its spectacular topographical façade and under its polished, semi-fashionable surface, Stockholm had become an asphalt jungle where drug addiction and sexual perversion ran more rampant than ever.’¹⁵ In contrast, the immediate post-war city is frequently throughout the series described in nostalgic terms: ‘Stockholm had been a different city then. The Old City had been an idyllic little town … before they had cleared out the slums and restored the buildings and raised the rents so the old tenants could no longer afford to stay.’¹⁶ The city’s appearance thus mirrors the transition between old and new, between past and present, offering physical testimony to a society in transformation, to a process at the centre of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s critique. In Manchette’s novels the focus is often on another aspect of urbanism, the banlieue (the suburban or indeed extra-urban periphery of a large city), providing in its progressive infrastructural degradation and alienation from the rest of French society an apt setting for depicting a period when the economic and social environment changes at the end of ‘Les Trente Glorieuses’ and becomes marked by unemployment, the oil crisis and the sequels to decolonisation.

Postmodernity and the emergence of the engaged crime novel

In ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984), Fredric Jameson characterises postmodernism loosely as ‘the end of this and that’ and more specifically as ‘the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.’¹⁷ According to Jameson, the ideological and cultural crises of postmodernism begin in the early 1980s, but ‘[t]he case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure’ taking place in the late 1950s early 1960s.¹⁸ Postmodernism, or postmodernity (as Jameson renames it later to distinguish the historical period from the style), is characterised by the fact that ‘all kinds of things, from economics to politics, from the arts to technology, from daily life to international relations, had changed for good’.¹⁹ While the crime fictions studied in chapters 2–6 of this book all deal with the ‘postmodern’ period after 1980, the engaged crime novel emerging in the 1960s can be said to be characterised by a notion of pre-‘postness’ in various forms, or what, in paraphrasing Jameson, could be characterised as the beginning of the end of this and that.

‘Postmodern crime fiction’ as a literary subgenre is generally associated with more literary writers such as Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Marquez and Don DeLillo.²⁰ The present study, however, prefers a broader understanding of postmodern crime fiction, situating a wider range of crime novels – including those of more popular stature within the mainstream of the genre – within the paradigmatic constellations of postmodernity. This view of postmodernity corresponds with Jameson’s conception of postmodernism, which aims ‘to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism’ rather than to present ‘a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available’.²¹ The novels examined in this book – without falling into the category of literary postmodern crime fiction – still use postmodern modes when adapting and redeploying a classic modern genre. The adjective ‘postmodern’ is thus here taken as referring to postmodernity as a historical if not in fact socio-historical category, rather than to ‘postmodernism’ as an artistic or aesthetic category.

Both Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Manchette explicitly place their writings within a paradigm of crisis or decline, and their crime fiction narratives can generally be understood in terms of an experience of the collapse of ideologies. The ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, to employ Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern condition, translates in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s case into a pronoun...