LECTURE DELIVERED AT OXFORD, 5 MARCH 1935
Some twenty-five years ago it was rather the fashion among commentators to deplore that Aristotle should have so much inclined to admire a kind of tragedy that was not, in their opinion, ‘the best’. All this stress laid on the plot, all this hankering after melodrama and surprise—was it not rather unbecoming—rather inartistic? Psychology for its own sake was just then coming to the fore, and it seemed almost blasphemous to assert that ‘they do not act in order to portray the characters; they include the characters for the sake of the action’. Indeed we are not yet free from the influence of that school of thought for which the best kind of play or story is that in which nothing particular happens from beginning to end.
Now, to anyone who reads the Poetics with an unbiased mind, it is evident that Aristotle was not so much a student of his own literature as a prophet of the future. He criticised the contemporary Greek theatre because it was, at that time, the most readily available, widespread and democratic form of popular entertainment presented for his attention. But what, in his heart of hearts, he desired was a good detective story; and it was not his fault, poor man, that he lived some twenty centuries too early to revel in the Peripeties of Trent’s Last Case or the Discoveries of The Hound of the Baskervilles.* He had a stout appetite for the gruesome. ‘Though the objects themselves may be painful’, says he, ‘we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms, for example, of the lowest animals and of dead bodies.’ The crawling horror of The Speckled Band would, we infer, have pleased him no less than The Corpse in the Car, The Corpse in Cold Storage or The Body in the Silo. Yet he was no thriller fan. ‘Of simple plots and actions’, he rightly observes, ‘the episodic are the worst. I call a plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of the episodes.’ […] He maintained that dreadful and alarming events produced their best effect when they occurred, ‘unexpectedly’, indeed, but also ‘in consequence of one another.’ In one phrase he sums up the whole essence of the detective story proper. Speaking of the denouement of the work, he says: ‘It is also possible to discover whether some one has done or not done something.’ Yes, indeed.
Now it is well known that a man of transcendent genius, though working under difficulties and with inadequate tools, will do more useful and inspiring work than a man of mediocre intellect with all the resources of the laboratory at his disposal. Thus Aristotle, with no better mysteries for his study than the sordid complications of the Agamemnon family, no more scientific murder-methods than the poisoned arrow of Philoctetes or the somewhat improbable medical properties of Medea’s cauldron; with detective heroes so painfully stereotyped and unsympathetic as the inhuman array of gods from the machine, yet contrived to hammer out from these unpromising elements a theory of detective fiction so shrewd, all-embracing and practical that the Poetics remains the finest guide to the writing of such fiction that could be put, at this day, into the hands of an aspiring author.
In what, then, does this guidance consist? From the start Aristotle accepts the Detective Story as a worthy subject for serious treatment. ‘Tragedy’ he observes (tragedy being the literary form which the detective story took in his day) ‘also acquired magnitude—that is, it became important both in form and substance. ‘Discarding short stories and a ludicrous diction, it assumed, though only at a late point in its progress, a tone of dignity.’ I am afraid that ‘short stories and a ludicrous diction’ have characterised some varieties of the genre up to a very late point indeed; it is true, however, that there have recently been great efforts at reform. Aristotle then goes on to define tragedy in terms excellently applicable to our subject; ‘The imitation’ (or presentment, or representation—we will not quarrel over the word) ‘of an action that is serious’—it will be admitted that murder is an action of a tolerably serious nature—‘and also complete in itself’—that is highly important, since a detective story that leaves any loose ends is no proper detective story at all—‘with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.’
Too much has already been said and written on the vexed subject of the catharsis. Is it true, as magistrates sometimes assert, that little boys go to the bad through reading detective stories? Or is it, as detective writers prefer to think with Aristotle, that in a nerve ridden age the study of crime stories provides a safety valve for the bloodthirsty passions that might otherwise lead us to murder our spouses? Of all forms of modern fiction, the detective story alone makes virtue ex hypothesi more interesting than vice, the detective more beloved than the criminal. But there is a dangerous error going about—namely that ‘if… detective fiction leads to an increase in crime, then the greater the literary merit, the greater will be the corresponding increase in crime’. Now this is simply not true: few people can have been inspired to murder their uncles by the literary merits of Hamlet. On the contrary, where there is no beauty there can be no catharsis; an ill-written book, like an ill-compounded drug, only irritates the system without purging. Let us then see to it that, if we excite evil passions, it is so done as to sublimate them at the same time by the contemplation of emotional or intellectual beauty. Thus far, then, concerning the catharsis.
Aristotle next discusses Plot and Character. ‘A detective story’, we gather, ‘is impossible without action, but there may be one without character.’ A few years ago, the tendency was for all detective stories to be of the characterless or ‘draughtboard’ variety; to-day, we get many examples exhibiting a rather slender plot and a good deal of morbid psychology. Aristotle’s warning, however, still holds good.
One may string together a series of characteristic speeches of the utmost finish as regards diction and thought, and yet fail to produce the true dramatic effect; but one will have much better success with a story which, however inferior in these respects, has a plot.
The first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of the detective story is the plot and the characters come second.
As regards the make-up of the plot, Aristotle is again very helpful. He says firmly that it should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Herein the detective story is sharply distinguished from the kind of modern novel which, beginning at the end, rambles backwards and forwards without particular direction and ends on an indeterminate note, and for no ascertainable reason except the publisher’s refusal to provide more printing and paper for seven-and-sixpence. The detective story commonly begins with the murder; the middle is occupied with the detection of the crime and the various peripeties or reversals of fortune arising out of this; the end is the discovery and execution of the murderer—than which nothing can very well be more final. Our critic adds that the work should be of a convenient length. If it is too short, he says, our perception of it becomes indistinct. […] He objects, still more strongly to the work that is of vast size, or ‘one thousand miles long’. ‘A story or plot’, he reminds us, ‘must be of some length, but of a length to be taken in by the memory.’ A man might write a detective story of the length of Ulysses,* but, if he did, the reader would not be able to bear all the scattered clues in mind from the first chapter to the last, and the effect of the final discovery would be lost. In practice, a length from 80,000 to 120,000 words is desirable, if the book is to sell; and this is enough to allow, in Aristotle’s general formula, of ‘the hero’s passing by a series of probable or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness or from happiness to misfortune’. Later, however, he conveys a very necessary warning: ‘A writer often stretches out a plot beyond its capabilities, and is thus obliged to twist the sequence of incident.’ It is unwise to ‘write-up’ a short-story type of plot to novel length, even to fulfil a publisher’s contract.
The next section of the Poetics gives advice about the unity of the plot. It is not necessary to tell us everything that ever befell the hero. For example, says Aristotle, ‘in writing about Sherlock Holmes’ (I have slightly adapted the instance he gives)
the author does not trouble to say where the hero was born, or whether he was educated at Oxford or Cambridge, nor does he enter into details about incidents which—though we know they occurred—are not relevant to the matter in hand, such as the cases of Vamberry the Wine Merchant, the Aluminium Crutch, Wilson the Notorious Canary-Trainer or Isadora Persano and the Remarkable Worm.
The story, he says
must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.
In other words, ‘murder your darlings’—or, if you must write a purple passage, take care to include in it some vital clue to the solution which cannot be omitted or transposed to any other part of the story. […]
Concerning the three necessary parts of a detective story—peripety, or reversal of fortune, discovery and suffering—Aristotle has many very just observations. On suffering, we need not dwell long. Aristotle defines it as ‘action of a destructive or painful nature, such as murders, tortures, woundings and the like’. These are common enough in the detective story and the only remark to be made is that they ought always to help on the action in some way and not be put in merely to harrow the feelings, still less to distract attention from a weakness in the plot.
A reversal of fortune may happen to all or any of the characters: the victim—who is frequently a man of vast wealth—may be reduced to the status of a mere dead body, or may, again, turn out not to be dead after all, as we had supposed. The wrongly suspected person, after undergoing great misfortunes, may be saved from the condemned cell and restored to the arms of his betrothed. The detective, after several errors of reasoning, may hit upon the right solution. Such peripeties keep the story moving and arouse alternating emotions of terror, compassion and so forth in the reader. These events are best brought about, not fortuitously, but by some hamartia or defect in the sufferer. The defect may be of various kinds. The victim may suffer on account of his unamiable character, or through the error of marrying a wicked person, or through foolishly engaging in dubious finance, or through the mistake of possessing too much money. The innocent suspect may have been fool enough to quarrel with the victim or to bring suspicion on himself by suppressing evidence with intent to shield somebody. The detective suffers his worries and difficulties through some failure of observation or logic. All these kinds of defect are fruitful in the production of Peripety. […]
This brings us to the very remarkable passage in which Aristotle, by one of those blinding flashes of light which display to the critic of genius the very core and centre of the writer’s problem, puts the whole craft of the detective writer into one master-word: Paralogismos. That word should be written up in letters of gold on the walls of every mystery-monger’s study—at once the guiding star by which he sets his compass and the jack-o’lantern by which he leads his readers into the bog; paralogism,—the art of the false syllogism—for which Aristotle himself has a blunter and more candid phrase. Let us examine the whole paragraph, for it is of the utmost importance.
‘Homer’, says he—if he had lived in our own day he might have chosen some more apposite example, such as Father Knox* or Mrs Agatha Christie, but thinking no doubt of Odysseus, he says of Homer—‘Homer more than any other has taught the rest of us the art of framing lies in the right way. I mean the use of paralogism. Whenever, if A is or happens a consequent B is or happens, men’s notion is that if the B is the A also is—but that is a false conclusion. Accordingly if A is untrue, but there is something else, B, that on the assumption of its truth follows as its consequent, then the right thing is to present us with the B. Just because we know the truth of the consequent, we are in our own minds led on to the erroneous inference of the truth of the antecedent.’
There you are, then; there is your recipe for detective fiction: the art of framing lies. From beginning to end of your book, it is your whole aim and object to lead the reader up the garden; to induce him to believe a lie. To believe the real murderer to be innocent, to believe some harmless person to be guilty; to believe the detective to be right where he is wrong and mistaken when he is right; to believe the false alibi to be sound, the present absent, the dead alive and the living dead; to believe, in short, anything and everything but the truth. […]
This brings us to the consideration of the characters, concerning which Aristotle takes a very twentieth-century point of view. He says that they must be good. This, I suppose, must be taken relatively, to mean that they should, even the meanest and wickedest of them, be not merely monsters and caricatures like the personages in a low farce, but endued with some sort of human dignity, so that we are enabled to take them seriously. They must also be appropriate: a female, he says, must not be represented as clever. […] Thirdly, the characters must be like the reality (to homoion). Scholars differ about what Aristotle means by this word. Some think it means ‘conformable to tradition’; that the villain should be easily recognizable as villainous by his green eyes, his moustache, and his manner of ejaculating ‘Ha!’ and the detective by his eccentricities, his pipe and his dressing-gown, after the more ancient models. But I do not agree with them, and believe that the word means, as we say to-day, ‘realistic’, i.e. with some moderate approximation in speech and behaviour to such men and women as we see about us. For elsewhere Aristotle takes the modern, realistic view, as when he says, for instance, that the plot ought not to turn on the detection and punishment of a hopelessly bad man who is villainous in all directions at once—forger, murderer, adulterer, thief,—like the bad baron in an Adelphi melodrama; but rather on that of an intermediate kind of person—a decent man with a bad kink in him—which is the kind of villain most approved by the best modern writers in this kind. For the more the villain resembles an ordinary man, the more shall we feel pity and horror at his crime and the greater will be our surprise at his detection. So, too, as regards the innocent suspects and the police; in treating all such characters a certain resemblance to real life is on the whole to be desired. Lastly, and most important and difficult of all, the characters must be consistent from first to last. Even though at the end we are to feel surprise on discovering the identity of the criminal, we ought not to feel incredulity; we should rather be able to say to ourselves: ‘Yes, I can see now that from the beginning this man had it in him to commit murder, had I only had the wits to interpret the indications furnished by the author.’