‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.’1
The first two sentences of Capital indicate at once the path that the author intends to follow and this path’s conformity with the general scientific approach: the latter commands that one set out from the empirical designation of a reality but then immediately take a distance from this reality and submit its terms to questioning. The scientist thus asks what this ‘commodity’ is, in its essence, insofar as accumulating commodities seems a patently obvious thing to do. But this simple passage from the false empirical self-evidence of the multiple to the theoretical formulation of its essence proves misleading. A promise to analyse a multiple reality is usually a promise to reduce it to its basic elements. Yet, this search is immediately escorted here by its contradiction. Setting out on a search for the basic unit named the commodity means obstinately encountering a duality: object of utility and depository of value, use value and exchange value, concrete labour and abstract labour, relative form and equivalent form, value of work and value of labour power, and so on. But this also means encountering the duplicity of the commodity – which lies about its simplicity – and of commodity exchange – which lies about the simplicity of the twoness constituting it. It means recognizing the dissimulation of the commodity. But it simultaneously means recognizing that this dissimulation is not a lie that one must get inside, that it is the commodity’s way of speaking truly about the dissimulation constituting it. The commodity’s appearance is not some illusion to get behind in order to discover the truth; it is the phantasmagoria attesting to the truth of a metamorphic process. The scientific exposé is about deploying a theatre of metamorphoses. It is this theatre that must be reconstructed from the simple thingness of a commodity or from the simple exchange of commodities that two individuals undertake. Behind one scene of metamorphoses, there is always another scene taking place. Analysis is not the reduction of the multiple to the simple but the discovery of the duplicity hidden in every simplicity and of the secret of that duplicity, which manifests itself in another theatre where it is at once unveiled and covered over anew. The work of science is not to disenchant a world whose occupants are supposedly lost in illusory representations. It must show, conversely, that the world that sober minds deem prosaic is actually enchanted, whereby its constitutive sorcery must be discovered.
Hence the fact that the demonstration is also a story that plunges into the heart of a secret. Hence, also, the constant deferment of this nonetheless quickly grasped secret. Marx indeed needs only a few pages to unveil the heart of the entire matter. ‘Now we know the substance of value. It is labour. We know the measure of its magnitude. It is labour-time.’2 From there it would seem one could go straight to the essential point: what is concealed is time. Commodity exchange is the way in which, in capitalism, the impalpable reality of the global distribution of social labour time is translated, a reality that is, in this system, also the reality of stolen time: not simply unpaid work time but the time for living that the victims of exploitation are docked. But this straight path is carefully spiked with barriers that, one by one, must be cleared away so that each time we discover that the task of revelation imposes the longest detour, that each one of the operations in which commodities are engaged is in fact the resolution of a contradiction, that a commodity cannot be exchanged for another unless each of them occupies an opposite, incomparable place. Serving this end is the singular dramaturgy of the encounter between the linen and the coat, from which the analysis of the commodity is developed: ‘Let us take two commodities, such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the value of the first be twice the value of the second, so that, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W.’3 What exactly is the status of this example? Clearly, it is not a matter of some situation borrowed from the empirical reality of exchanges. If it is a matter of showing the capitalist reality of commodity circulation, then this linen seller selling his goods for half a coat is clearly contrary to type. It must thus be seen that this point of departure in fact advances an entirely abstract model of exchange. But, in this case, why be burdened by these pieces of linen? Why not simply use mathematical symbols? It must thus be concluded that this coat and this linen are neither empirical examples nor abstractions clothed for convenience. They are the characters of a play. And it is owing neither to the author’s coquetry nor to his concern for fun teaching methods that Marx lends them a language, a gaze, a sentiment, as well as arguments and loving emotions. If they speak and if, on occasion, they use sophisms, if they seek a kindred spirit and desire to enter into the body of the other, it is for two reasons: on the one hand, it is because they thus do something that they cannot, and by vainly trying their hand at doing it they confess to being neither real things nor real persons but fantastical beings whose secret of manufacture must be discovered. On the other hand, it is also to occupy the stage in place of the things that would be real things and the persons who would be real persons.
For what is at stake in the analysis is not simply to reveal the historical reality of the capitalist mode of commodity production behind the supposed eternal laws of the economy. Just as much, if not more, it is to prohibit a certain form of critique of the economy and a certain way of resolving its contradictions. Indeed, there is an apparently simpler way of dispelling both the phantasmagoria of market exchange and the relation of exploitation it expresses, a way that suppresses at once the mediations of the dialectic and the intermediaries of property. That the commodity is at once an object that meets a need and the embodiment of an average social labour time does not necessitate seeing a contradiction in it. One may simply see in it a complementarity that is to be harmoniously regulated. Humans trade the objects they need. They also need, for the labour time that they devote to producing objects useful to others, to be remunerated in such a way as to permit them to obtain objects of use to themselves. The condition of this equal exchange is the elimination of the parasite that strives to reduce remuneration for the work done and to increase the price of its product, namely the theft perpetrated on work by property. The producers of wealth need only to recognize that there is neither a mystery nor an evil spell in their products, but simply an equilibrium to be achieved and that can be achieved if they agree to exchange their products among themselves – if they turn the exchange of commodities against gold into an exchange of services among producers. That, in sum, is the simplest way for the reified world of commodities to be rendered unto the human subjects whose powers have been alienated in it.
The Marxist tale of the commodity’s enchantments is made, first, to bar this happy ending to the capitalist curse: that republic of free producers dreamed of by the militants of workers’ associations and for which Proudhon delivered the theoretical formula. The analysis of the contradictions and sophisms of the sensible-suprasensible being named the commodity is a war-machine directed less against the economic science of capitalism than against this prosaic liquidation of capitalist exploitation. It is made above all to say: no direct exchange of services and products is able to replace the unequal exchange of commodities. As soon as the global distribution of social work takes the figure of an exchange of products, these products can only be commodities. And ‘independent’ producers exchange their products freely only insofar as they are dependent on the system of global dependency embodied in these products. Free agreement between producers can only be a sublimation of the real exchange of the commodity ‘labour power’ for the commodity ‘gold’, which itself is but the form under which dead labour sucks time and blood from living labour. In the age of the globalization of productive forces, the reconquest of collective power by producers can no longer take the form of an exchange between products and services. That beyond of capitalist exploitation would be a return to before its birth.
But this judgement is not the simple verdict carried by the science of history that shows stagnation to be impossible and returns to earlier times illusory. It is equally the decision that founds a certain idea of science and of the history of which it is the science. What this idea excludes is not simply anachronism; it is bad history, that which gets rid of the enchantments of metamorphoses at a cheap price so as to avoid passing through the crucible of contradiction. It does not choose science against hi/stories, it decides for one (hi)story over another, a tragic hi/story over a comic hi/story. The characteristic of a real tragic story, as we’ve known since Aristotle, is the exact coincidence between the production of a knowledge-effect (recognition) and the inversion of a situation (the peripeteia). This inversion is not simply the misfortune that befalls the happy man but the misfortune born of his happiness itself, the effect born of a cause that it would seem ought to have produced the opposite effect. Bad tragedy, by contrast, replaces inversion with ‘equitable’ remuneration, such that the good are recompensed and the bad punished. Yet, this equitable settlement brings tragedy closer to comedy, in which the inversion of situations simply gets turned into a reconciliation of characters: ‘It belongs rather to comedy, where the bitterest enemies in the piece (e.g. Orestes and Aegisthus) walk off good friends at the end, with no slaying of any one by any one.’4
The Proudhonian cutting out of parasites in favour of a direct agreement between producers is a comedy of this kind. It is the erasure of a productive contradiction in favour of a reconciliation that remunerates each according to their work. What Marx meant to exclude is this conciliation, this becoming friends of enemies. And to exclude it from the denouement, it must be excluded from the very construction of the situation. What must be made impossible from the start is that characters who are enemies can end up friends. Now, precisely this elimination is ensured by the initial dramaturgy of the one-on-one encounter between the linen and the coat. In this dramaturgy ‘enmity’ is posited from the outset, and it is posited not as accidental but as structural. The way in which each of the characters relates to the other is only ever the way in which one’s ‘enmity’ or one’s internal contradiction is expressed. Being at once a useful object and an abstract expression of value, this duality must be an internal contradiction in the piece of linen itself at the same time as being invisible in the threads out of which it is woven. This contradiction can be revealed only in an operation of exchange in which the value of each commodity is distributed in two forms that are ‘mutually exclusive or opposed extremes’.5 Which is to say that this enmity can only be revealed to science by being concealed from the gaze in that pure harmony of kindred spirits, which the analysis must undo before the confrontation of the commodity with the general equivalent of gold reveals the ‘salto mortale’ at the core of every simple exchange and the permanent possibility that the commodity’s love for money is not repaid.6
This process of revealing and covering up the contradiction is formulated only ‘in the language of commodities’, in their enigmatic language, which only ever says the truth by concealing it. In this, the phantasmagoria of commodities also excludes the comedy of friends. If the characters cannot become friends at the end, the simple and sufficient reason is that they are not characters. It is not the producers or traders of commodities who speak and act in this dramaturgy. It is the commodities themselves. And they do so, of course, in their own way – that of ‘sensible-suprasensible’ beings. The sensible-suprasensible being is a being whose mode of manifestation reveals that its form is the product of a metamorphosis, that it results from a process that takes place on another scene. Its mode of being is that of a hybrid: a phantom that is lent thought, voice, sight, feeling or action only so as to demonstrate that its scene of effectivity is not that of real personages; an automaton whose movements indicate that the energies animating them come from elsewhere, that is, from a ‘social relationship’ which is exactly not the one that a commodity’s buyer and seller entertain. Namely, a social relationship that is the automatism of a global system of dependency, one in which an ‘enmity’ always reveals a more fundamental ‘enmity’, in which revelation always refers to a deeper secret, and in which even the recognition of the automaton’s secret is not enough to reverse its effect.
For the revealed secret here is a double matter: science works to untangle the enigma into which it transformed the apparently clear-cut formula of commodity exchange. But this work of revelation also proceeds in another manner at the very heart of empirical reality. The change of theoretical terrain that science requires so as to dispel the misleading appearance seen at first glance is indeed coupled with another shift: one toward an empirical place where the truth disguised in these appearances is also given ‘at first glance’. This splitting exemplarily illustrates the view solemnly imparted to the reader as a farewell is bid to these exchangers of linen and coats and capital is inspected at the point at which it purports to buy at its price the commodity it calls labour:
Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs a notice ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at least be laid bare.7
This passing from the noisy site of appearances to the secret laboratory gives a somewhat misleading account of the movement of science. For it was not the ‘noisy sphere’ of exchanges that filled the preceding pages. It was a dramaturgy that transformed this calm surface into a fantastical tale of phantoms and automatons and thus anticipated the voyage into the heart of the process of metamorphoses: the existence of a commodity endowed with the miraculous power to create value – the force of human labour – and of a laboratory devoted to the forced exploitation of this miraculous power. More, however, both this laboratory’s localization and the qualification of its secret give way to ambiguity. On the one hand, this laboratory is not a laboratory. The term is a metaphor to indicate the site of science, the work of analysis that will yield the secret’s formula: that of the appropriation of surplus labour that is precisely not etched on any place where it could simply be sought out. On the other hand, this laboratory designates a site of real experimentation: Capital’s massive experimentation on the bodies of men, women and children in order to produce this surplus labour. Now, this experimentation can be seen at work if one leaves the offices and libraries of the learned to see what is being carried out on production sites everywhere. Worker districts reveal a landscape in which these contradictions can already be seen to be directly materialized, while elsewhere they require analysis to be recognized:
The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known. It is otherwise with the housing situation. Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding concentration of workers within a given space; and therefore the more quickly capitalist accumulation takes place, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class.8
If we go through the doors of the factories we will see that this law of inverse proportion, already visible on the ground, is the product of a large-scale experiment on the workers’ bodies, an operation that is never said to be such, but whose actions are at all times visible and are everywhere confessed in practice by those who are unaware of it in words.
The prosaic world of the factories is in itself a vast laboratory, in which experts in extracting unpaid labour undertake a large-scale experiment in corpore vili. In this laboratory, it is a matter of extracting the maximum amount of surplus labour that bodies are able to produce and, to this end, of having permanently at one’s disposal the greatest number of workers’ bodies with the property of producing more value than their production and upkeep costs: bodies to hand at all times, able to be employed and paid only for the time that they serve; adult male bodies, when the work demands particular strength or qualification; women’s and children’s bodies, which are less costly, when the work is easier and demands only that the bodies be there to carry out the necessary and sufficient acts for the longest possible time. To this end, the time during which the worker reproduces simply the value of his labour power must be reduced to a strict minimum, and the time in which he produces a new value extended to a maximum. Short of being able, like Wallachian boyars, to statutorily transform twelve days of corvée into fifty-six, it is necessary to upset people’s temporal rhythms and breaks, to reduce meal and sleep times, to scramble, by means of the relay system, the very difference between day and night, to render unverifiable the names and ages of the children employed, as well as the length of time for which they work. By the same token, the limits set on childhood and adulthood must be loosened. Each of these operations avows the heart of the system: the daily theft not simply of created value, but of the time for living that creates it. This time for living that, each day, is reduced to a time of survival, and where this very surviving is diminished through an attrition of forces, by rarefied air made unbreathable by factory heat, by cramped and overcrowded workshops and dormitories, and by all the ensuing illnesses that are the small change of one basic illness, encapsulated in the law of the vampiric system, namely the law of inverse proportion, whose simple formula must be disclosed behind the equations of exchange: life made short by long hours.
The laboratory’s great secret is, in sum, inscribed twice over: once in the scientific operations by which sensible self-evidences are deconstructed to arrive at the formula of inequality hidden in the equations of exchange; and once directly on the bodies whose time for life is sucked dry in the vampire’s laboratory. On occasion, this writing of the law of inverse proportion on bodies is laid bare for the attention of public opinion: causing a stir in the press was the case of Mary-Anne Walkley, a young woman who died at twenty years of age in June 1863 after having worked for twenty-six hours non-stop – saison oblige – to make outfits for ‘Madame Elise’ for a Court ball to honour the new Princess of Wales. But this law parades unmasked through all the reports that, duly commissioned by respectable Members of Parliament, were written up by factory doctors and inspectors. These individuals accurately gather the testimonies of nine-year-old children who sleep on a foundry floor before beginning their work day at three in the morning.9 With their own eyes they see the rooms of twelve square feet in which fifteen to twenty children, ‘piled up like herring’, work fifteen-hour days with an attention and speed that does not even permit them to raise their eyes for an instant to reply to the investigators’ questions.10 They calculate the cubic content of air granted the women and children of the factories and compare it to what medical science deems necessary. They note that the time-stealing machine cannot be stopped, so that if a child due for a shift is missing, another who has already finished their work day must continue working instead. They note that the bosses make no mystery of it and always end up confessing the grand secret of overexploiting the time for living. Some bosses do so with a certain discomfort: ‘Our objections to not allowing boys under 18 to work at night, would be on account of the increase of expense … Skilled hands and the heads in every department are difficult to get, but of lads we could get any number.’11 Others sum up their ‘small thefts’ in a frank and limpid formula: ‘If you allow me (as I was informed by a highly respectable master) to have workers work only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand pounds a year in my pocket. Moments are the elements of profit.’12 These ‘confessions’, taken from inspectors’ blue books, accompany each moment in the analysis of the production process: the simple work day, which produces absolute surplus value; the intensified work day, which produces relative surplus value; the process of capital accumulation, which produces a working class in ever more excessive numbers, ever more crammed into overly small dwellings. They take us right to the revelation of the secret’s secret: this primitive accumulation by which workers are expropriated through violence, separates them from their means of living and obliges them, by the enforcing of savage laws, to put their bodies at the disposal of the blood-sucking monster thus produced. This history is not only recorded in manuscripts in which it is described at length. It is ‘written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’.13
The secret of surplus value is deciphered with difficulty through science. Time theft and the destruction of lives are everywhere written on bodies. This tension between the hidden and the patent gives to Book One of Capital – the only one that Marx published, the only one to which he gave the completed form of a book – its singular narrative structure. This singularity is the conjunction of two movements running in opposite directions. Indeed, the growing complication of the analysis that gives an account of the development of capitalist production goes hand-in-hand with a countermovement that, conversely, ever reduces the complexity of the process to the bare simplicity of the avowed process of extortion and has the end of the book coincide with that process’s point of departure, in primitive accumulation’s naked acts of violence, which have enabled this complex process to be set up and whose mystery science comes to shed light on: the appropriation of common goods, the violent expropriation of the peasants, laws against vagabonds, the trafficking of sold bodies and the suffering of tortured bodies that created and set in relation the personages of the capitalist scene – accumulated wealth to be exploited and labour power forced to sell itself.
This countermovement is outlined by illustrations that accompany each moment of the process and sometimes seem superfluous. Did so many examples really have to be gathered to illustrate the demonstration of surplus value? Did the testimony of the child potter William Wood really have to be added that of the child J. Murray, then that of the young Fernyhough, which contribute no new element to the analysis?14 Did match factories and tapestry factories need to be added to the example of potteries, since they depict an identical process, or the picture then completed with an enumeration of the ingredients – human sweat, cobwebs, dead cockroaches, putrid yeast and more – that go into the making of the ‘daily bread’ sold to the poor?15 Was it really necessary, in order to refute Malthus and establish the argument of relative overpopulation, to have us visit, subsequent to doctor Hunter, the Richardson house in Wrestlingworth (Bedfordshire), with its plaster walls bulging like a lady’s dress in a curtsey and its clay and wood chimney curved like an elephant’s trunk and propped up by a long stick;16 the house of H. in Reenham (Berkshire) with its bedroom without window, fireplace or door, in which a father and his son sleep on the bed in the room while the girls, both of them mothers, sleep in the hall; the bedroom of a house in Tinker’s End (Buckinghamshire), in which eight people lived in a room eleven feet long, nine feet broad and six feet five inches high; and a significant number of cottages visited by the same doctor in twelve counties?17
Marx gives two reasons to justify this accumulation of examples. The simplest one hints at the boils that prevented his advancing with the ‘properly theoretical part’ of the book. But his work on this book was not paid by the line. Nothing obliged him to compensate for this delay in the theoretical development by lengthening the ‘historical’ part. So he adds a second explanation: these ‘insertions’ constitute a ‘supplement’ designed to update the book that Engels published in 1845 on The Condition of the Working Class in England.18 The argument itself is flimsy since this supplement is meant above all to show that, in twenty years, nothing has changed. When Engels republishes his book another twenty-five years later, he tends to show, conversely, that things have changed because capitalists no longer need the ‘small thefts’ that Marx had detailed in his wake.19 Far more, the book that Marx supplements is his own. But this supplement is something other than an addition. These ‘illustrations’, which seem to build on each other to corroborate the rigorous scientific tale, in fact compose a second story, the disorder of which obeys another sort of rigour. The point is not simply to use the bruteness of visible facts to refute the expert’s sophisms, having already used scientific analyses to refute the false evidences of the visible. Both the theoretical development and the accumulation of examples are subject to a narrative labour. This labour transforms the former into a fantastical tale. It turns the latter into an epic descent into hell. The palpable exchange is turned into a story of phantoms that divulges the hidden contradiction of economic discourse. Conversely, the well-hidden contradiction must be shown to be everywhere exposed, everywhere avowed, as the vampiric, dead labour that, before the eyes of all, feeds daily without let-up on living labour. But the two demonstrations must also be bound together, at the risk of their running in opposite directions. As the contradiction develops and complexifies in the scientific account, the counter-account returns to the fire-and-blood history that is its primary motor, the motor that, for its part, pertains to no science at all.
The nature of the game that science and history play is complicated indeed. Science unveils the contradiction at the heart of the formulae of political economy. And the elaboration of the contradiction must show that its supposed eternal laws are those of a determinate historical mode of production. But how are we to grasp the laws of this mode itself? How are we to grasp their historicity, which is also to say the destruction of the world whose constant reproduction they determine? For this task, more is needed than simply to show that the system’s logic is driven by contradiction. The order of the world is made of the harmony of contraries. It is made, as Empedocles had already said, of the very tension between love and hate. And the learned Marx himself agrees. The exchange of commodities can certainly not be carried out unless contradictory conditions are fulfilled. But it is also a contradiction that ‘one body constantly falls towards another and at the same time constantly flies away from it’.20 We might then conceive the movement of capitalist society on the model of the movement of celestial bodies:
Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, takes on the form of periodicity.21
The argument continues and attempts to problematize this normal periodicity by maintaining, by contrast, the possibility and even necessity of shortening cycles and worsening crises. The crux of the problem remains: the normal logic of science is doubly opposed to that of good tragedies, wherein enemy forces become friends and causes produce effects, which in turn become causes that produce the same effects. Where friends become enemies and the effects of causes invert is for another dramaturgy, called history, to deal with.
But this dramaturgy is itself marked by contradictory requirements. On the one hand, history is the process whose mechanism must be revealed behind the so-called natural laws of the economy. This complex mechanism itself has a primary motor. The regularity of commodity movements finds its first cause in the naked violence of primitive accumulation, which gave science its object by leaving in it the mark of its origin – that of fire and blood. This form of historicization, however, which reveals the contingency at the origin of necessity and the ‘enmity’ at the heart of science, by itself promises no good resolution to the contradiction, no interruption to the regular movement of economic contradictions. The contingency that refutes so-called natural necessity cannot be asked to found another necessity. Primitive accumulation resembles those Shakespearean tragedies in which the murder that gives rise to a reign only ever engenders a new round of murders. To escape this simple matter of sound and fury, the story that countered the necessity of ‘nature’ had to take it up again on its own account. In this movement, whereby capital is modelled on the revolution of celestial bodies, another prime mover had to be found other than the pure contingency of a history of murder and theft. Now, the solution to the problem does exist. This movement can be set on the soil of another science, that is the new natural history in movement, whose model Cuvier provided in his history of the revolutions of the earthly globe. To do so, we need only marry the geological model of uplifts in the earth’s crust with the dialectical model of the negation of negation. Such is the price at which the prime mover’s naked violence can be transformed into the statuary midwife of history and at which Shakespearean drama becomes an episode in a natural science of history.
The chapter in which we are shown the regularity of the movement of capital, which came into the world ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’,22 is thus followed by the abrupt appearance, as though fallen from another planet of thought, of another story of the genesis of Capital, in which the latter is rendered as an historical accomplishment of eternal dialectical reason in the form of a geological uplift. The regime of small independent producers who own their means of production cannot, Marx explains, go on forever without ‘decreeing universal mediocrity’.23 This is why,
At a certain stage of development, [that regime] brings into the world the material means of its own dissolution. From that moment, new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society, forces and passions which feel themselves to be fettered by that society. It has to be annihilated; it is annihilated.24
Oddly, the preceding chapters had said nothing about these constricted forces and passions, and the end of the same chapter again describes the birth of capitalism as the simple ‘expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers’.25 But this constriction, which comes out of the blue, is necessary insofar as it enables the ‘negation of negation’ to be identified with a geological process as inevitable as the revolutions of the earthly globe and that guarantees that ‘capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation’.26 The book can then close by again sealing the breach that determined the very movement of its dramaturgy and leaves to its readers the care of knowing how to use its science to write a new history on the surface of the earth.
According to a learned rumour, the roman policier (detective story) was born in April 1841. This was the very month, indeed, that Edgar Allan Poe published ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in a New York magazine. What remains to be thought through is the meaning of this birth. Historical and sociological science sometimes view it as an outcome of the era’s preoccupation with crime and the situation that it highlights: the dangerousness of those urban spaces with poorly lit, windy streets where criminal networks hide confidently among the flood of new and wretched populations arriving from the countryside or from abroad. In the modern literary tradition, however, what marks the invention of the crime novel genre is something else entirely: a model of fictional rationality that stands opposed to a realist, or psychological, dissolution of novelistic plots. Such is notably how Borges salutes it in the famous preface to Morel’s Invention.
One fact is easily verifiable: even if the imaginary Rue Morgue – a narrow passage that Poe situates in a populous working-class quarter of Paris – may match the view of crimes as being naturally engendered by the urban breeding ground, the enigmatic murder, whose extraordinary account the narrator and his friend Dupin declaredly read in the evening edition of the Gazette des tribunaux, bears scant resemblance to the era-typical crimes and images of criminality that daily filled this newspaper. To see this, we need only read the crime chronicles the Gazette reeled off daily and its reports about criminal trials in that same year of 1841. Bar the occasional trap laid at the exit of a popular café for clients having imprudently flaunted their wealth, these matters conform to a dominant model, which is that of family quarrels: misunderstandings between spouses or between parents and children; adulterous, jaded women with violent husbands whom they conspire against with their lover or their daughter or son-in-law; disputes between generations or between parents and parents-in-law over inheritance issues... The result is that, in some neck of the woods or on some riverbank, someone stumbles upon the body, maybe dismembered and disfigured, of a man whose relations, say, had left on business for a few days or had disappeared without informing anyone. The trail leading to the guilty party here is generally easy to trace: the neighbours had already witnessed quarrels and heard threats being uttered; some of them, taken by surprise at these sudden departures, began to gossip; some accomplice let slip a few unfortunate words, so when the investigation was opened, each of the suspects sought to get out of trouble by denouncing the others. The murder is, in short, the final act of an already manifest story of violence. This story unfolds in the family and unravels among neighbours. It is an affair of a proximate nature; its causes never to be sought far away. Accordingly, the shrewdness of police officers is hardly called for to shed light on the crime and identify its author. The only science that intervenes in the matter is the science of doctors, whose minutely detailed autopsy reports make it possible to bring the effect closer to its cause by establishing the probable murder date, the nature of the injuries and the instrument used to strike the fatal blow.
The scene with which the double murder dreamt up by the poet of Baltimore presents us is entirely different. In it, murder assumes the figure of enigma, the solution to which will have to be sought as far as possible from any family or neighbourhood affair. The crime has taken place in a tightly closed-up building and in a room whose door and windows were locked from the inside. The rationality of the fictional police investigation is thus straightaway linked to a certain idea of the place of the crime: a place where entering is as impossible as leaving. And this will also be the case in the era in which reporter Rouletabille seeks to clarify the mystery of the yellow room. The subject of the new genre’s crime is inconceivable in its execution. It is also inconceivable in its motivation. Neither the mother nor the daughter were known to have had family feuds. Neither were known to have had other family at all. And the disorder at the crime scene, which usually puts the police on the trail of whoever had been there looking for money, jewellery or papers, conversely deepens the enigma, for one of the elements of this disorder is the presence of two bags lying on the ground containing 4,000 francs in gold that the murderer thumbed his nose at carrying off. The murder and the brutality of its perpetration were motivated by neither interest nor hatred. Truth be told, nothing motivated them. And this consideration, we know, founds Dupin’s correct hypothesis: this murder, the execution of which presumed a more-than-human agility and brutality, and the conception of which matched no human interest or sentiment, was not committed by a human being. Confirming this a contrario is the only identificatory element contributed by the witnesses: each one of them, whether the Italian or the Spaniard, the Dutchman, the Englishman or the Frenchman, believed he had heard a foreign voice. One might as well say that none of them identified any human voice here. The conclusion draws itself, even if, to verify it, it requires the cunning of a misleading announcement: this double crime is the work of an orangutan. This crime, one might as well say, is not one, since in modern societies it is not standard practice to qualify as such a death inflicted by an animal on a human. Not only does this exemplary crime, whose elucidation symbolically marks the birth of crime fiction, differ from all those with which the justice system and police must usually deal, but, more radically still, it is no crime at all. The new crime genre is born as a paradoxical fictional genre: the elucidation of an event or a series of events in which the specific rationality consists in its radical distance from all the known forms of causal chains of human actions that it might be compared with.
This gap can be conceived in two ways. The first sees in it the occasion to apply mental faculties in excess of the forms of causal rationality ordinarily at stake in human affairs in general and in criminal affairs in particular. What in French is called a roman policier, in English is called a detective story, and it is indeed born with the character of the detective. Now, this character is not a private or amateur police officer. He is properly a non- or anti-police figure, a man whose social status and mode of thinking are opposed to those of the civil servants dedicated to the ordinary management of crimes and trained in the type of rationality that this management implies. The figure of the detective, which gives the detective story its proper agent, is very exactly an outsider, someone who sees things differently because he stands outside the logics of seeing produced by the social functions of population management and public order maintenance. This outsiderness is the only piece of information that Poe deems useful to provide about his ‘detective’ Auguste Dupin. Dupin is simply characterized as the son of a well-to-do family who has lost his fortune but nevertheless enjoys a modest rent enabling him to live as he pleases. But living as he pleases for him means living in a way that inverts the normal order of time and the occupations to which it is given. Each morning Dupin says farewell to this order of things by closing his shutters at the first light of day, so that, with his apartment shut tight, he can study by the simple light of candles. Each evening, at nightfall, he steps out to seek, ‘amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford’.27 An imposed darkness during the day, a seeking out of light at night – such are the conditions by which he is able to hone the analytic faculty that stands opposed to the ingenuity of calculating men just as, since Kant, intellectual intuition has stood opposed to the connections of the understanding. The ingenuity of calculating men – professional gamblers, police officers and possibly criminals – is but the mediocre art of ordering, as a series of blows, the causes specific to producing the expected effects. As for the analytic faculty, it is the mental power that matches thought with vision by reuniting in a sole act the ordinarily opposite activities of intuition and deduction. It grasps phenomena diagonally, at mid-distance, whereby a twofold source of errors is avoided: using too small a set of details to make deductions, as this leads sight astray; and losing oneself through thinking in a search for the subterranean causes of phenomena, when everything has rather to be grasped in a single chain on the basis of what is seen. The ideal detective is one who simultaneously opens his eyes wide onto the visible and closes them to order the elements through internal sight.
This form of the relation between outside and inside is the one that makes it possible to untangle the enigma of crimes committed in closed-up spaces into which one cannot enter and from which one cannot leave. And this is again the sort of ‘good reasoning’ thanks to which, by closing his eyes, the young Rouletabille solves the mystery of the yellow room. The logic of the detective story can indeed not be limited to the simple science of traces passed down from The Three Princes of Serendip or Fenimore Cooper’s stories of Mohicans. It is not enough to observe traces accurately to identify those who have left them. The relation of traces to their author has to be part of a total chain of causes and effects. And, to see this chain made by closed doors and windows, one has to close one’s eyes. The complete interconnectedness of phenomena can be established only in the mind. The faculty of grasping an entire chain of consequences in the unique act of seeing is something that another young man formulated two years prior to the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. This lesson was the one that the young Louis Lambert taught his ‘mate’ from the college at Vendôme: ‘Thinking is seeing [...] Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause [...].’28 What one sees must be immediately connected to the chain of thoughts that assign its invisible cause – this mental faculty by which a soul penetrates the secrets of another is paradoxically that one that makes it possible to detect the wholly material ‘crime’ of an orangutan. This apparent paradox is the simple application of the principle ‘the one who can do more, can do less’. Indeed, it was not on account of his acumen for unravelling a police enigma that Dupin had first impressed the narrator, but thanks to his adeptness at accurately reading, while strolling silently alongside him, the narrator’s thoughts as they unfolded on his face and in his gestures. This was how Dupin reconstructed the chain by which his companion’s thoughts went from the fruiterer whose basket had thrown him to the ground, to a consideration of the unevenness of the cobblestones, to the stereotomy that had been used for the paving stones of another street, to Epicurus’ atoms, to the confirmation of atomistic theory by recent cosmogonic discoveries, to the Orion Nebula overhead, and lastly, by means of a Latin verse concerning this constellation, to a satirical article about an ancient cobbler named Chantilly who prided himself on playing tragedy despite his diminutive stature.29
The episode is a lesson in philosophy: empirical associations of ideas are merely manifestations of the spiritual interconnectedness of all phenomena. Dupin professes to rule out all supernatural causes from his investigation. But the analytical faculty by which he is able to solve the unsolvable enigma of the double murder distinguishes itself from the calculations of police – and criminals – just as the mind’s vision distinguishes itself from fleshly eyesight. Dupin reads the solution in the sight of the disordered room just as he reads the sequence of thoughts on his friend’s face. Though Poe’s output may not follow the rhythm of French literary actuality, the history of the murders on the rue Morgue arrives right on time between two of Balzac’s books: Louis Lambert, published two years earlier, and Ursule Mirouet, published in feuilleton form the following autumn, and in which the Swedenborgian communication of souls will be key to unmasking the perpetrator of a theft. If detective fiction emerges with Poe, it emerges in a universe of Swedenborgian spirituality, as far as possible from any sociological rationalization of criminality. If it ties literature and science together, this is not, in the first place, via the forms of medical and chemical examination with which police investigation had begun to be associated. As Régis Messac well highlights in his pioneering research, detective fiction emerges as the implementation of a very specific idea of science, embodied by two figures, namely Cuvier and Swedenborg, who simultaneously inspire Balzacian social comedy and its authors’ mystical speculations: the scientist who reconstitutes an extinct species on the basis of a single anatomical element and the mystic who inscribes this reconstitution into the universe befitting it – that of the grand connection between beings and events, an entirely spiritual interconnectedness that only a mind with an intelligence endowed with exceptional sensible powers can perceive.30 The detective novel participates in scientific rationality not by the meticulous studying of clues and laboratory research but by the faithful inscribing of every clue into the chain that emblematized science for a century: that science which, wherever fleshly eyes see only dispersed phenomena, establishes a necessary connection with the whole of the universe. If detective fiction is enduringly connected with ‘investigation into a mutilated and dismembered body’, it is not to witness the brutality of the crime and its perpetrator, but to offer the analytic faculty the occasion to deploy itself by reinserting this fragment in the great chain of beings. For police and judicial investigation, the dismembered body is that of a victim whose assassin must be found, whereas for the detective endowed with the analytic faculty, it is something completely different: it is an isolated state in a chain of sensible events whose overall articulation must be reconstituted. Some time later, this linking of phenomena in a whole will be identified with a certain idea of materialist science, but for the time being it is thinkable only as an entirely mental linking, accessible only to a deductive capacity identified with the construction of wholly internal, wholly mental senses: that internal world of senses in which the poor Louis Lambert’s reason goes to ground but that, more prosaically, enables the ingenuous Ursule Mirouet to come into the possession of her bequest. The crime novel and the philosophical novel are brothers insofar as they communicate within one and the same scientific faith, one and the same idea of science: that which states that there exists, in the universe, an interconnectedness among all phenomena that escapes ordinary intelligence but that can be grasped by the particular form of intelligence able to see the linked in the unlinked.
This is the first way by which the gap between the new crime novel and standard everyday criminality may be thought. This novel is the occasion to wager on a type of rationality that goes beyond normal powers of deduction by perceiving the spiritual interconnectedness among all phenomena. The problem is that this scientific rationality refers to an idea of science that was beginning to flounder at the time. In the 1840s no one any longer expected new discoveries from this idea of science. Which is exactly what made it available for fiction. But this availability only arises through a displacement that unties the complete interconnectedness of all phenomena from its spiritualist horizon and turns it into a principle of fiction’s internal rationality. This is therefore the second way in which the gap of detective novel fiction can be thought of and which modernist posterity will salute in Poe. This way does not set itself against the ordinariness of crime and police rationality but against fiction in its realist development. For this, all it needs is to establish a parallel between the method of detective Dupin and the ‘philosophy of composition’ proclaimed five years earlier by Edgar Allan Poe the poet. This philosophy is demonstrated by the procedure of composition of a poem, but its focal problem is introduced via a supposed ancestor of the detective story, Godwin’s Caleb Williams. Poe starts by citing Dickens’s claim that Godwin developed his novel from its ending, that is from the manhunt, the reason for which is supplied in the later written first part, namely the explanation of the crime committed by a bourgeois above suspicion. Replying to this allegation, Poe puts forward an argument that, after having seduced Baudelaire, will serve as the emblem of a certain idea of literary modernity, that of the unity of effect:
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.31
In this philosophy, in which some have seen the catchword of literary modernity, one may conversely see a renewed version of the old Aristotelian definition of fictional rationality: the construction of a chain of necessary or verisimilar events that is separated from the chronicle of facts by showing how things can occur and all be linked together, instead of simply recounting how they actually transpired, one after the other. Detective fiction led by the ‘analytic faculty’ offers the exemplary form of a renewed Aristotelianism. If this fiction has to do with modern society, it is negatively. The rationality of making a deduction from instantaneous observation, like that of the unity of effect, endeavours to ward off the danger that this society presents for fictional rationality in the eyes of Poe and those nostalgic for the distinguished universe of belles-lettres alike: the danger that fictional rationality will get bogged down in the universe of prose and its prosaic details.
Here, however, the spiritualist claim of strict causal rationality parts with the nostalgia of reactionaries: the problem is not to dispense with the details but to change their function. True, it might be said that Balzac had already resolved this problem. None of the details with which he overwhelms readers hurrying to see the plot get underway are ancillary to it. Each of them signifies a society and an era. Balzac thus made the furniture of the Maison Grandet speak, as he did the façade of the hôtel du Guénic in Beatrix or that of the The Cat and Racket. But he could do so on a very precise condition, which was to insert the entomological science of Cuvier into the visionary science of Swedenborg. When this connection is undone, signs return to the state of things, the space of action becomes cluttered and the novelist gets tangled up in it, just like the policemen who, jeered at by Dupin, to find the famous ‘stolen letter’, examine all the rungs of the chairs and the jointings of all the furniture under the microscope. In the same way, the time of fictional action becomes lost in the details of this or that moment. Novelistic fiction adds something to the fragmented time of the chronicle up until the ultimate identification of action’s very motor with the routine of rains and nice weather. Some years later, and in the name of a wholly other idea of science, an unknown novelist would, on the pretext of emending the celestial dreams of his heroine, see no difficulty in likening the progress of a love story – and of the novel recounting it – to the rain that collects on the terraces of houses when the gutters are blocked.32 This so-called realist novel, with its commonplace characters, its repetitive time and its insignificant events, threatens to drown the ancient logic of fictional action in that ‘insipidity and emptiness of each day’, whose sway over modern French literature Borges will denounce a century later.33 By opposing to this literature’s greyness the series of marvels that his compatriot, Adolfo Bioy Casares, managed to deduce from a single postulate, Borges well highlights the artificialist tradition that emerges from ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Crime fiction, with its unbelievable events and its extra-lucid geniuses, here appears as a war-machine against the novelty of realism. The so-called unity of action enables it to re-establish a tour de force by which the improbable takes place in logical fashion. Its exemplary function is to order the anarchy of details in which the connections of fictional rationality risked being lost.
But it undertakes to do so at a time when the great dream of the spiritual interconnectedness of everything with everything else is coming undone. This is why, from the outset, the rationality of its plots will be torn between two opposite models. On the one hand, it will wildly raise the stakes of the realist method, in which the detail becomes a sign. On the other, it will reject everything that the eye has presented to it as proof, taking the opposite stance to the one the signs would have us believe. This appears immediately in the conflicting methods used by the chevalier Dupin’s first two French heirs: namely, the two characters that Émile Gaboriau entrusts with stymieing the ordinary police and judicial logic of the ‘ideal culprit’ – detective Tabaret and his disciple, the atypical policeman Lecoq.
Hero of The Lerouge Case, Tabaret is a scrupulous man in his gathering of traces and clues; he makes the mud outside talk, as he does the dust on the top of wardrobes or the position of the clock’s hands. So it is that, at the end of one-and-a-half hours of investigations, he is able to announce to a dumbfounded audience that the Lerouge widow was getting undressed and winding up her cuckoo clock when the assassin, whom she knew well, knocked at the window shutter, this man being still young, of slightly above average height, elegantly dressed, and, who, on that very evening, was wearing a high hat, holding an umbrella and smoking a Trabuco cigar in a holder. The police chief, furious at having the convenient fiction, that of the ideal culprit, jeopardized, is not wrong to denounce in Tabaret a new mode of author who ‘has become an amateur detective for the sake of popularity’ and who ‘professes, with the help of one single fact, to be able to recreate all the details of an assassination, as that savant who from a single bone reconstructed extinct animals’.34 In any case, Tabaret’s performance establishes a genre: in A Study in Scarlet, another of Cuvier’s and Dupin’s disciples, Sherlock Holmes, equally convinced that ‘all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it’,35 and capable of divining at a glance the history of a man and his occupation, will dumbfound Doctor Watson and the police in exactly the same manner by announcing to them, after a meticulous examination of the footprints in the mud outside and the dust in the house, that the killer is a man of more than 180 cm in height, has a florid face, remarkably long fingernails on his right hand, was wearing square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar.36
The mind certainly feels it more satisfying to use rain to find a murderer’s prints in the mud than it does to turn it into the metaphor of provincial love. But these exercises of virtuosity regarding footprints and cigars are still somewhat too prosaic, somewhat too close to the daily mud to be able to illustrate the rationality to which the philosophy of the crime novel is devoted and with which an idea of modern fiction is identified. This is why Lecoq, despite being Tabaret’s student, takes a step further when tackling the crime of Orcival. The exhibition of deciphering signs is assuredly apposite to dumbfounding the audience. But dumbfounding one’s colleagues is certainly not the problem. The problem is to confound the killer. And the killer, ordinarily, is not an orangutan. It is a human being endowed with intelligence who also understands the logic of signs and can therefore use it to countervailing effect: not to point someone toward the truth but to induce one into error. Anyone in the presence of a profusion of signs must therefore take things the other way around, by thinking that, if these signs are there, visible to the naked, and even trained, eye, it is to carry out the ordinary work of the visible, which is to present appearances apt to conceal the truth, which is by definition invisible. The argument of the uninterrupted continuity of phenomena must then be thwarted by hollowing out anew the gap between appearance and truth. If there are visible signs, it is because they have been arranged to put the investigator off course. The method the investigator will adopt is thus to see them as so many signs that indicate the way in which the crime did not take place. This is the lesson Lecoq dispenses. If the corpse was found at the water’s edge, then it was placed there deliberately after a murder committed inside the castle. If it is pierced with knife wounds, then the killing was the result of a single blow. If an axe is lying on the floor of the room where the crime probably took place, then the killer did not use it. If the bed is unmade, then no one has been sleeping in it. If there are five glasses on the table, there were not five guests, and for that matter the fact of finding a meal’s leftovers on the table is enough to prove that nobody either drank or ate at it.
The Aristotelian rationality of tragic fiction derived from the operation that made the manifestation of truth coincide with the reversal of fortune overwhelming the hero. The new rationality of crime fiction initially appears to renovate and revitalize this logic. But it ultimately leads to something else entirely. Tragic fiction functioned by inverting the meanings of oracles and signs. These latter were veridical. It was simply that the truth proved different from what the hero had believed and what the chain of facts suggested. Lecoq’s logic removes this plasticity from signs. It forces them to be either true or false. It thus reduces the mimetic operation of a reversal of appearances – the inversion of what was expected – to the Platonic operation that simply deduces the appearance’s falsity from its visibility. The basic criterion that makes the truth the contrary of appearance comes to replace the path leading from a sign to its truth. Police rationality, at a pinch, simply tells us this: the crime was not committed as it appears to have been. In general things do not occur as one thinks they do. The truth is recognized in its being the contrary of what the apparent interconnectedness of phenomena would have us see.
This truth is indeed no longer of the Swedenborg era. It is contemporary, by contrast, with the new figures of the true that accompany the age of positive science: those that, with Schopenhauer, opposed the senseless truth of the will to live to the necessary illusions of the Veil of Maya, or, with Marx, the reality of the process of producing material life and its historical development to the inverted reflections that it produces in the darkroom of ideology. The detective stands opposed to the police functionary just as the scholar who, with Marx, perceives the reality of the economic process from the outside stands opposed to the agent of production, who occupies a position within this process that condemns him to not seeing it. Lecoq’s rationality most certainly adheres to these two new modes of scientific faith, as they re-establish, against the simple affirmation of the complete interconnectedness of all phenomena – whereby the issue was merely to see more in a single look – the opposition between the world of visible appearances and that of the invisible truth. This renewed Platonism serves as a theatre for the philosophical and political quarrel over whether the science of the true world makes it possible to change life or whether the lie is that which alone renders this world tolerable. Exactly what this brings to literary fiction still remains to be known – that is, outside of the seductive paradoxes that, in the following century, will play on the confusion between traitor and hero, investigator and criminal or tracker and person tracked. Both the virtuosity enabling one to deduce the type of shoes the killer was wearing and the cigars he smoked, and the wisdom that dismisses too obvious signs, seem incapable of supplying that chain of causation most apposite to distancing fiction from the stagnant waters on the terraces of the realist novel. At a time when shoes and cigars began to be produced and sold en masse, it is already rather fanciful to hope that they could serve to identify a killer. It is even less to be expected that they could furnish the fictional reasoning required: some explanation of the cause-effect links that led this particular individual to commit this specific crime in this place, with or without cigars. The unity of effect – or the linkage of the promised marvels – seems truly to cease at the point where the footprints are correctly matched with the shoes that produced them. It remains entirely bound to the order of efficient causes devoid of final cause. The fine chain of deduction that explains, with a wealth of detail, how the crime was committed does not touch at all on the question of knowing who committed it and why. Dupin dismissed the problem by attributing the double crime of the Rue Morgue to a being that needed no reason to strangle its victims. Yet it was necessary that, close to the victims’ house, a Maltese sailor had lived who had had the peculiar idea of setting up in a Parisian apartment with an orangutan. Similarly, Dupin will reckon he’s done enough to establish, contrary to the blaze of pernickety refutations published in local newspapers, the exact place and time of Mary Roget’s murder, and to prove that it was the deed of a man acting alone, not of a gang. He will have thereby shown once more the necessity for reason to avoid the trap of ‘detail’. As for knowing what reason the ghost-like naval officer, identifiable by the periodicity of his appearing and by his way of making a slipknot, might have had for killing that grisette in which the reader has no particular reason to be interested, this is manifestly not his problem.
It will most certainly be one for his successors. Knowing the height, and type of high hat and cigars of the Lerouge widow’s killer, Tabaret still has no indication that would enable him to trace the matter to the deceitful switching of infants – worthy of Trouvère – which is the ultimate reason for the murder. He will have to learn about it quite independently. And this pertains to the realm of pure miracle, since the one who informs him spontaneously of the role played by the Lerouge widow in the baby-switching case is his young neighbour across the landing whom he treats as his own son and who, even more conveniently, will reveal himself to be the killer. Tabaret’s science can deduce the killer’s height and clothing but, to uncover him, Tabaret already has to have him near at hand, not just as his neighbour across the landing but also as a character from an entirely other sort of fiction, the melodrama of a baby switched at birth. In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes faces a similar problem: the killer’s square-toed boots and Trichinopoly cigars say nothing by themselves about the cause of the murder in an abandoned London house. The cause must stem from elsewhere and even from quite far afield, as with Poe’s sailors. And, to explain it, the author must change not only the literary genre, but also the mode of enunciation and ultimately the type of book. Indeed, it is a second book that begins when the novelist divests Watson of speech and gives it to an impersonal narrator who, taking us to Salt Lake City thirty years earlier, tells us the story of the killer, Jefferson Hope, whose fiancée had been snatched and his adoptive father killed by Mormons. If the killer – a righter of wrongs – comes from so far afield, this is because the story of the crime and that of its reasons are two different stories. This original dissociation has accompanied the crime fiction story to this day. Attesting to this in exemplary fashion are Henning Mankell’s novels, which, more than once, resolve, deep in the Swedish provinces, affairs of hatred and injustice that originate in the Algerian desert, apartheid South Africa, the plantations of the Caribbean or some other remote theatre of violence. By means of a tour de force they always unite, in one and the same logic, the effects of two kinds of knowledge: one that relates the mutilations suffered by bodies found in a well, a ditch or a lake in a small provincial locality to their causes, and one that relates particular criminal behaviours to the global interconnectedness of political and social relations on a world scale. But this contradiction is not specific to a novelist keen to reconcile his skill as a creator of plots with his political convictions. Global imperialism is neither more nor less out of place in Ystad than the orangutan from Borneo was in the Saint-Roch quarter, the melodrama of the infant switched at birth in a villa of Bougival, or the vengeance wrought by a young man from Nevada on Mormons from Utah in an abandoned house in London. The police rationality that Poe invented sought to oppose the modern novel’s lostness in the universe of random beings and things to the beautiful unity of action that reduces every detail to its function and every effect to its causes. But it did so only by splitting action and its rationality. It tightened to the utmost, sometimes to the point of mockery, the chain of efficient causes, but this drove it apart more radically still from the order of final causes. This is why the paradigm that Poe invented served foremost to illustrate to the twentieth century the modernist dogma of literary rationality. For their part, crime fiction authors from the same century knew how to take their distance from it. All refinements concerning the causal plot are banished when another Baltimore native, Dashiell Hammett, strings together the spate of murders in The Red Harvest.37 The cause of the crime is crime itself. It is the existence of a criminal milieu in which the violent settling of scores is normal conduct and becomes the centre of social life through the complicitous actions of moneyed and powerful men. And this milieu, in which criminals, victims and police officers all equally have a hand, is the one that becomes the subject of the crime novel. From Chandler to Ellroy, Hammett’s successors have understood that their stories’ success would be more assured with the glaucous lights and corruptive atmospheres of the naturalist novel than with the logical paradoxes or the inner seeings of the poet from Baltimore.