Following the clues

In a previous post, I described modern heroes and villains functioning as mirror images of each other. For example, Moriarty is a counterweight to Holmes, creating a duality we also see in Hector/Achilles and Iago/Othello: Holmes is impossibly intelligent; Moriarty is impossibly cunning. Holmes is good; Moriarty, evil. But Holmes’ role generally isn’t to be a paragon of goodness, it’s to explain the story, to unlock the narrative.

Watson is something like a Greek rhapsode, a narrator who starts of by asking someone else – the goddess, for Homer; Holmes, for Watson – to tell you, the reader/listener a story. Watson is embedded in the narrative, but there’s a sense in which he’s a narrator at secondhand: it’s Holmes who’s responsible for the key part of the exposition. Another Ancient Greek analogue here is the Chorus, which frequently steps in to explain what’s happened offstage (usually a particularly gruesome death which would’ve been too hard to present in the theatre). Shakespeare often does something similar, so that, in Julius Caesar, for example, the whole scene with Antony presenting Caesar with a diadem happens offstage and is explained at quite odd length onstage by Casca, even though there’s no obvious reason Shakespeare couldn’t have had this happen at the Globe. Presumably the reason he did it this way is that Brutus’ response to the information is more important than the information itself, and it was more effective to have him react in dialogue than it would’ve been to have him watching the tableau and making asides to the audience. Anyway, I’m not here to disagree with how Shakespeare thinks things ought to be staged.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s intentions, there’s a long history of multiple layers of narrative, going right back to The Odyssey, where the muse inspires Homer to tell the story of Odysseus, who himself narrates most of his own story (and, if you fancy another layer, the rhapsode would be in a sense ‘playing’ Homer, as well as the other characters, whenever they sung the poem). However, as we saw before with the hero-villain dichotomy, genre fiction presents a qualitative difference to the familiar setup of multiple narrators. Doyle-Watson-Holmes don’t just tell a story, they work backwards from a conclusion, unwinding the events that led up to the problem that we’re initially presented with. It’s not as simple as previous expositions, where characters would enter to find, e.g., a dead body, and another character would come in and say, ‘Ah, good sirs, I wouldst tell thee what hath happened this day, but break my heart it would’, until we all die of impatience and they eventually say, ‘It was him [points at A MAN TWIRLING HIS MOUSTACHE AND CACKLING]’. In detective fiction, the process of telling actually retells and reconstructs the narrative. The good detective story uses information we already have to cast the narrative in a new light, and in doing so resolves the mystery.

This is the key point: the detective doesn’t narrate the story, they narrate it again, presenting the same information in a new light. When Holmes explains how he solved the mystery, he isn’t like Odysseus explaining how he got home; he’s more like Aeneas in the first book of The Aeneid or even Penelope in Maragret Atwood’s Penelopiad: the same story, the same ‘facts’, but a new interpretation. But this time, it’s not a sequel or a reimagining of an existing story, it is the story.

As with the redevelopment of the hero-villain aspect of narrative as an internal quality of the narrative, the detective genre turns the telling and interpretation of the narrative into the narrative itself. Again, it’s postmodernism in embryo. To understand detective fiction, we must already have a strong grasp of how narrative works. This is why, as I’ve argued, genre fiction is not literary fiction on easy mode: it in fact demands the audience understand how narrative works in order to unravel and rebuild its own narrative. In the next post, I’ll show how this is equally true with genres.