Despite its near-definitive tendency to problematize or collapse generic boundaries (demonstrated in many of the readings in this book) postmodern fiction, like any current within literary history, has inevitably favoured some genres over others, though not of course using them ‘straight’, but adapting and subverting them. This chapter assesses the way that postmodern literary fiction co-opts two popular narrative genres – science fiction and detective fiction – and the implications of this for understanding how postmodern fiction works.
Science fiction, and its potential to offer an alternative to realism – and a critique of it – has proved central to postmodernism. We have noted this already with regard to writers such as Burroughs, Vonnegut, Atwood, and Acker, each of whom draws on sci-fi in their work.
The reason for this is explained by Brian McHale, the theorist who has made the most valuable contribution to the study of the relationship between postmodernism and science fiction, and its subgenre cyberpunk. We recall that science fiction plays a key role in his poetics of postmodernism, as ‘it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence), and so serves as a source of materials and models for postmodernist writers’ (McHale, 1987, 16). This is because both postmodernism and sci-fi make use of ‘the universal fictional resource of presentation of virtual space’. Of course, as we considered in Chapter 1, ‘projecting virtual space’ is a definitive characteristic of all fiction. But McHale's point is that few modes of writing ‘foreground and exploit the spatial dimension to the degree that SF and postmodernist texts do’ (McHale, 1992, 247).
Both, he thinks, share origins in medieval romance, fiction which uses ‘enclosed spaces within the romance world: castles, enchanted forests, walled gardens and bowers’ which function as ‘scale-models or miniature analogues of worlds’ and thus allow us to explore what is normally directly unrepresentable in fiction and has to remain implicit, what McHale describes as ‘the very “worldness” of world’ (McHale, 1992, 247). In science fiction the castles or enchanted forests are replaced by ‘domed space colonies, orbiting space-stations, subterranean cities’ (McHale, 1992, 247).
McHale argues that the late twentieth century witnessed a gradual ‘science-fictionalization of postmodernism’. More than just the deployment of motifs and topoi from science fiction in non-generic texts (e.g. Slaughterhouse-Five, The Passion of New Eve, or The Handmaid's Tale) McHale is referring to the way postmodern texts confront one world with another at a structural level – that is, when the structure of a text is built around the juxtaposition of or inter-relationship between two worlds. Sci-fi ‘proper’ tends to do this literally, telling stories about interplanetary travel or beings from one planet visiting another. But without dealing with ‘outer space’, postmodern fiction also sets world against world. An example would be Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark (1982). Without drawing on the sci-fi genre, it features a double narrative involving two parallel worlds, the real-life Glasgow being set against the fictional Unthank, both of which reflect on each other. (The outcome is that the represented Glasgow is revealed, inevitably, as a fictional construction in important ways.)
But just as postmodernism has been ‘science-fictionalized’ the converse is true, according to McHale, and sci-fi has become increasingly ‘postmodernized’, that is, by reinforcing its interest in confronting worlds with a self-reflexive concern with literary worlds. This is central to the most postmodern incarnation of science fiction, its late-twentieth-century subgenre, cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk is best understood as a wave of radical science fiction which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and which built upon the ‘new wave’ science fiction by the likes of Ballard, Aldiss, and Moorcock. This movement was more concerned with what Ballard termed ‘inner space’ (‘an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge’, as in surrealist art by the likes of Magritte or Dali [Ballard, 1968, 106]) than ‘outer’ space and displayed a specific preoccupation with the decline of the contemporary world. Cyberpunk's lifespan as a pioneering literary ‘movement’ was comparatively brief (Bukatman, 1993, 137), beginning in 1984 with the publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, and continuing for a decade or so with works by other authors such as Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan (though a number of ‘postcyberpunk’ genres, such as ‘biopunk’ and ‘steampunk’, have been identified by some critics).
The term ‘cyberpunk’ was first used as the title of a short story written by Bruce Bethke in 1983, but became widely used in 1984 to describe Gibson's Neuromancer. In particular, it is concerned with the way that new technology enables us to enter into a kind of ‘virtual reality’ (this term was coined by Gibson). The term cyberpunk itself is a neologism. Its first part, ‘cyber’, is a short form of the word ‘cybernetics’, a term used by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948 to refer to a new science which, broadly speaking, explored the relationship between human beings and machines, and, more precisely, linked communications theory (how information is transmitted, for example through the media) and control theory (which analyzes the behaviour of ‘dynamical’ systems).
But the ‘cyber’ in cyberpunk also relates to two other relevant uses of the prefix. The first is ‘cyborg’, a hybrid of human and machine in whom the machine elements are integrated into the human body in order to enhance its natural capabilities (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, 2). The cyborg is most obviously exemplified in the 1987 film Robocop, and has been the subject of an important contribution to the postmodern debate, Donna Haraway's feminist essay, ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). There she explains the mythic value of the figure of the cyborg in breaking down the boundaries which have structured Western existence since the Enlightenment: private and public, nature and culture, human and machine, physical and non-physical. The second related term is ‘cyberspace’ – another one coined by Gibson – to describe a space generated in the mind of a person operating or being controlled by a computer system, which also takes over his or her entire nervous system.
The ‘punk’ in the title refers mainly to the kind of attitude this fiction was seen to embody: anti-authoritarian, rebellious, and fascinated by the seedy world of drugs and machismo which punk rock symbolized. Cyberpunk is also associated – either through depiction within its pages, or by association on the cultural scene – with other youth subcultures in music and style. Punk rock, which in England emerged in the late 1970s, famously had a ‘do-it-yourself’ aesthetic whereby anyone could pick up a guitar or a microphone and be in a band regardless of talent or training.
Gibson's comments about writing his novel Neuromancer at times present himself as an uncertain amateur, putting together bits and pieces from fiction he knew to produce something original (McCaffrey, 1991a, 267). But this reminds us too that ‘punk aesthetics’ (McCaffrey, 1991a, 221) refers to the method of bricolage, the kind of cannibalizing of pre-existing genres and texts by cyberpunk authors we have considered in relation to Kathy Acker, a mixing of high and low cultural forms and a countering of the myth of the author as originary genius.
Cyberpunk recycles the clichéd conventions of classic science fiction – ‘the robots and the braineaters and the starships’, as Rudy Rucker once put it (Rucker, 1999, 462), as well as some of those associated with other literary forms and authors. Mark Bould points out that Neuromancer exhibits ‘traces’ of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, J. G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Robert Stone, Howard Hawks, and John Carpenter, and ‘cobbles together’ the character Molly ‘out of Wolverine and Cyclops from Marvel Comics's X-Men’. Gibson confessed that the interior descriptions in his The Difference Engineer were all lifted more or less straight from Victorian novels (Bould, 2005, 219).
Where ‘classic’ twentieth-century science fiction (e.g. by the likes of Frank Herbert or Arthur C. Clarke) is set in a world far in the future, cyberpunk takes as its setting earth in the near future. The assumption behind it is that as a result of technological change and the revolution of what sociologists call the ‘second media age’ (namely the advent of computer-based and digital methods of communication), we are on the point of entering a new era, one characterized by the way that technology can remake the human body and the world. The settings of cyberpunk conform to McHale's notion of ‘microworlds’, those elements descended from the romance which enable readers to explore how worlds are made. McHale suggests that the cyberpunk version of these microworlds is typically more of an ‘orbiting slum’, a ‘shabby, neglected, unsuccessful, technologically-outdated’ world, than a shiny, technologically advanced world, like the Death Star in Star Wars. Such a world is depicted – so vividly that the novel is often regarded as initiating the entire genre – in William Gibson's Neuromancer, by far the most important and celebrated text in the cyberpunk canon.
It is actually unfair to claim that Neuromancer kicks off cyberpunk all by itself, for Gibson was part of a ‘school’ of similar writers emerging at the same time, such as Sterling, Shirley, and Shiner. Nevertheless Neuromancer did strike reviewers as something quite different from existing science fiction, a new fictional genre, one moreover that was wholly in tune with the ‘postmodern condition’. The cities which provide its setting are teeming with different types of people, and the practice of corporate branding present in our world has been taken to extremes. Name-checked throughout the novel are Braun coffee-makers, Sony computer monitors, Citröen cars, the ‘Mitsubishi bank of America’, while employees have their company's logos tattooed on the backs of their hands.
Two elements of Neuromancer (and this is in fact true of the whole genre of cyberpunk) are particularly distinctive. First, there is Gibson's ability to create a powerfully-realized, detailed world – one close enough to our own to be instantly recognizable, and far enough in the future to be disturbingly plausible. We might describe this as the ‘cyber’ element of the novel, its virtual world realized in the virtual world of narrative fiction. Secondly, there is Gibson's liberal deployment not just of elements of previous texts but of the conventions of other kinds of fiction (the ‘punk’ element).
But cyberspace also ‘exists’ as a more concrete space for certain inhabitants of the world to visit. Cyberspace, also known in Neuromancer as ‘the Matrix’ (and the famous film of that name might, incidentally, be seen as late cyberpunk) is defined by the novel (via a voice-over in an imaginary educational documentary) as:
The Matrix enables a person to enter another part of the world from wherever he or she is, and experience things by proxy, through the body of another, and even continue to exist after he or she has died. The plot of Neuromancer revolves around the existence of its hero, Case, in cyberspace. In fact, cyberspace is his very raison d’être: he refers contemptuously to bodily activities, such as travel, as ‘meat things’ (Gibson, 1995, 97). Case is a ‘console cowboy’ (39), a middle-man thief who specializes in stealing hacker software for more powerful thieves. Having made the ‘classic mistake’ (12) of stealing from these, his own bosses, he is punished by having his nervous system damaged by mycotoxin. Consequently he is prevented from accessing cyberspace, the place where his work was previously conducted and, more painfully, is also deprived of the addictive high of cruising through this world.
The novel begins as, his career over and increasingly enmired in drug abuse, he tries in vain to obtain a cybernetic implant from the black market dealers in Chiba City in Japan, only to be suddenly ‘rescued’ by a mysterious ex-Special Forces gang leader named Armitage. In exchange for repairing his neurological damage and curing his drug addiction by modifying his pancreas (thus making him into a cyborg), Case must work for Armitage, using his skills as a hacker to secure vital information for him. He is paired up with another cyborg, Molly Millions, a professional criminal who has had mirrored glasses inset surgically into her eye sockets and razorblades protruding from her fingernails, and together they embark on a labyrinthine series of adventures as they assemble a crack team to do the work, coming up against a series of hostile organizations and individuals such as the secret Tessier-Ashpool clan and their cyber-ninja Hideo, and the two halves of a huge independent Artificial Intelligence construction, ‘Wintermute’ and ‘Neuromancer’.
More detailed summary of the plot would sound even more ridiculous and incomprehensible. This is partly due to the effect of the typical sci-fi fondness for complex names and organizations, but also because the plot owes a great deal to the conventions of the romance, a genre which specializes in the marvellous and the fantastic, and typically features questing heroes. A common element of the romance is a convoluted, labyrinthine plot full of twists and turns and peopled by characters who are not who they seem.
This is, in fact, where we need to consider the second distinctive feature of Neuromancer, its use of previous genres. It invokes the genre of the romance, but more precisely, in keeping with its logic of recycling, echoes the conventions of two other quintessentially modern American descendants of the romance, the ‘hard-boiled’ detective story, as pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and especially (in this instance) Raymond Chandler, and the Western. Case is an incarnation of both the questing private investigator and the gun-toting outlaw who is nevertheless working against a greater evil. An even closer relative is the video game, which is also typically a version of the romance, as the novel reads as if Case is progressing through the levels of an action-adventure game.
Reading Neuromancer is like being in a dream where it seems as if all the generic motifs – private-eye quest, the sexy S&M female sidekick, the assemblage of a team of talented crooks and misfits – have been encountered somewhere before. ‘Neuromancer’ refers to one half of a vast AI construction which can generate cyberspace, in ways that recall another descendant of the romance, the Gothic novel (the activity of the computer hacker, guessing passwords to access secret worlds, is compared to the practice of summoning up dark spirits). Yet of course the term also signals that the novel constructs a ‘new romance’ out of the bits and pieces of the old.
What is especially interesting about Gibson's novel is the way that its two most characteristic elements – its imaginary world and its bricolage – actually come together to reinforce one another, so that its form mirrors the ‘constructed’ nature of the world it projects. Neuromancer's locations are remorselessly urban, a world where no distinction is possible any longer between the natural and the constructed, as suggested by the famous first line of the novel which compares the sky to ‘the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’ (Gibson, 1995, 9). Similarly, the ‘punk aesthetic’ of the novel emphasizes the fact that the narrative is not ‘natural’, but has been assembled from bits and pieces of existing texts and genres.
This is not the only way in which the story of Neuromancer implicitly comments on literary production and consumption. A parallel which is not made explicit at any point in the text (Neuromancer is not metafictional in the way many postmodern novels are) but which is bound to strike any student of literature, is how the thrills and benefits of entering cyberspace, as Gibson envisages it in this novel, resembles the act of reading fiction – especially, in fact, the kind of thrilling plots favoured by modern descendants of the romance genre which the novel draws upon, such as the private-eye novel, sci-fi, and the Western. Cyberspace means that Case can appear in alternative locations no matter where he is stationed. It also means he can experience the world from the perspective of another person (as he frequently does through Molly).
Though Case's travels in cyberspace have their ‘real’ dangers (he nearly ends up trapped in cyberspace forever by ‘Neuromancer’) there is still a valid parallel between them and the experience of reading the novel. Reading Neuromancer involves entering a version of ‘cyberspace’ – safer but no less vivid. This is common in the box-like structures of the romance, where the reader experiences all the twists and turns of the plot just at the same time as the hero, and is faced with the same uncertainty about characters and situations which confront him or her.
This aspect illustrates McHale's thesis that the microworlds of science fiction and cyberpunk enable the idea of world itself – how it actually operates, how we relate to it – to be represented. It also reminds us, once again, that fiction creates multiple worlds, and worlds which are larger than their textual depiction. A concept associated with science fiction is that of the multiverse, a term used first by the philosopher William James to describe a universe lacking order or governing principles, but which tends to be used in science fiction to refer to multiple, co-existent worlds. While the multiverse may be imagined as something which exists in the diegesis of a work of science fiction, it also refers to the kind of proto-sci-fi experiments with narrative space we find in the like of Borges's ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Coover's ‘The Magic Poker’. However, to equate cyberspace to fiction, as the logic of Neuromancer suggests, also leads us to a paradoxical conclusion. Cyberspace may be a radical prediction of a very different future, but another way of looking at it might be as simply a more powerful version of what realist fiction has always been able to do. Realism enables us to enter different worlds and experience things through the minds of people who are not us.
Critics are in broad agreement that the detective story ‘proper’ begins in 1841, with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. By ‘proper’ I mean that elements of the genre which were to become instantly recognizable as detective fiction are more or less in place in this tale. It has a distinctive ‘tripartite’ structure, by which the narrative focuses first on the discovery of a crime, then on the casting of suspicion on the members of a community, and finally (the longest part) on the mechanism of investigation and solution. Most importantly, in the character of Chevalier Auguste Dupin, Poe's enigmatic detective, the cornerstone of the tradition was put in place. The conventions initiated by Poe in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and two further stories featuring Dupin, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rôget’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845), were subsequently ‘formalized’ over forty years later with the advent of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1887–1913) and then the Agatha Christie-led ‘Golden Age’ of ‘clue-puzzle’ detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Consequently the detective story is often associated with modernity. It is the genre above all in which the modernist/Enlightenment fantasy of order and control finds expression. Each classic detective story ends with a restoration of social order and a resolution of the mystery with which it began – suggesting that social cohesion and hierarchy is preserved and that the human mind, the rational faculties (supported by scientific techniques) reign supreme.
It is a commonplace of the study of the detective genre that its representation of detective-work figures as the complement to the practice of reading texts. The detective is a figure whose job is to decode signs and impose narrative order upon an apparently chaotic mass of detail. The reader consequently becomes a ‘literary’ detective engaged in a similar process of interpretation to the detective, doubling him in his quest to decode a series of signs and arrive at a final meaning. Jorge Luis Borges, who was fascinated by the detective story, once stated that Edgar Allan Poe, in inventing the detective story, really invented the reader of the detective story. That is to say, ‘a reader who reads with incredulity, with suspicion, with a special kind of suspicion’ (Borges 1985, 16). This form of reading, ‘paranoid reading’, became, as we noted in Chapter 1, institutionalized by the time of modernism and ‘practical criticism’ (the 1920s and 1930s) – the same moment detective fiction reached its highpoint with the ‘Golden Age’.
Paranoid reading is central to the subgenre of detective fiction known variously as the ‘metaphysical’ detective story, the ‘anti-detective’ story or the ‘postmodern’ detective story, which is defined by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney in their collection Detecting Texts as ‘a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective's role as surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot’ (Merivale and Sweeney, 1999, 2). It is acknowledged by the editors and many of the contributors to the collection, that this form of fiction is a particularly postmodern phenomenon. It deploys the techniques of metafiction and intertextuality, frequently referencing classic detective stories by Poe and Doyle. In particular, postmodern detective fiction draws the reader into the activity of ‘paranoid reading’ only to frustrate his or her efforts at interpretation. This is at work in each of the three of the most celebrated examples which I shall go on to discuss here – Borges's ‘Death and the Compass’ (1941), Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980) and Paul Auster's City of Glass (1985).
Exemplifying the ingenious response to the ‘exhaustion’ of fictional forms which so impressed John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a sequence of three short intellectual thrillers which systematically revisited Poe's three great originary detective stories: where ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ was published in 1841, Borges's ‘Death and the Compass’ appeared 100 years later; ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ was published 100 years after Poe's ‘The Mystery of Marie Rôget’ in 1942. ‘Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth’ (1950) lapsed a little behind the centenary of ‘The Purloined Letter’ (he intended this to follow the pattern and appear in 1945, but found this the hardest to complete).
Rather than exact parodies or variations, Borges's tales parody more generally the epistemological dominant of the classic ‘clue-puzzle’ detective story by disrupting the realist singular world of classic detective fiction. The most powerful of these is Borges's short story ‘Death and the Compass’ (‘La Muerte y La Brújula’). The story tells of how the great detective Erik Lönnrot is called in to investigate the mysterious murder of one Marcel Yarmolinsky who had been the occupant of a room next door to a famous set of precious jewels. The echoes of Poe's detective fiction are overt, from the outset. Yarmolinsky has been killed in a locked room, as in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (a convention which was to become a staple of the genre), while Lönnrot is a version of the flamboyant eccentric detective à la Dupin or Holmes – one who indeed ‘believed himself a pure reasoner, an Auguste Dupin’ (Borges, 1989, 106).
At the crime scene the dull plodding sidekick figure, Treviranus, another integral feature of the detective genre, exemplified in Doyle's Watson, whose function is to intensify the awe and mystery surrounding the detective, immediately guesses that because the jewels were ‘the finest sapphires in the world’ owned by the Tetrarch of Galilee, the murder represents a botched robbery: breaking into the wrong room, the thief was confronted by Yarmolinsky, and was forced to kill him. Playing to type, confident almost to the point of smugness, Lönnrot replies:
Possible, but not interesting.…You’ll reply that reality hasn't the least obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis that you propose, chance intervenes copiously. Here we have a dead rabbi; I would prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.
(Borges, 1989, 107)
In the classic Sherlock Holmes tale, Lönnrot would be proved right, and the solution much more complex than it seems. His suspicions seem to have foundation, too, given that in Yarmolinsky's typewriter is a sheet of paper stating, ‘The first letter of the Name has been uttered’. Sure enough, this murder is swiftly followed by two other deaths. Yarmolinsky was murdered in the north of the city on 3 December, and on the night of 3 January, a second body, that of Daniel Azevedo (incidentally, Borges's family surname on his mother’s side), is found in the west of the city. Chalked over the ‘conventional diamond-shaped’ patterns on the walls of the shop where he is found is the sentence, ‘The second letter of the Name has been uttered’.
The third murder, of one Gryphius-Ginzberg, appears to have taken place (though no body is found) on the night of 3 February in the east of the town, after the words ‘The last letter of the Name has been uttered’ are found scrawled on the wall where the victim has made a desperate phone call to Treviranus. It seems the killings are over, and to underline this Treviranus receives a letter accompanied by a map of the city which informs him that there will be no more murders as the three deaths in the north, west, and east form ‘the perfect vertices of a mystic equilateral triangle’ (Borges, 1989, 112).
Lönnrot is not convinced, however. The first victim, Yarmolinsky, was a noted Talmudic scholar amongst whose possessions had been found a study of the Tetragrammaton – a word with four letters, which refers to the Hebrew secret name for God. It seems obvious to him that there will be a further murder in the south of the city, completing a diamond equivalent to the four points on the compass and the four letters of the Tetragrammaton. Furthermore, given that in Jewish culture each day begins at sundown rather than midnight, it means that each murder has actually been committed on the fourth of the month. This means that the fourth and final murder will be on 3/4 March. Using a compass on the map of the city Lönnrot pinpoints the location of the final murder, a deserted villa named Triste-le-Roy. He goes there intending to catch the criminal in the act and discovers an eerie, disorientatingly labyrinthine building. This is when the twist in the tale is clear. Lying in wait for him is a master criminal named Red Scharlach.
Scharlach informs him that the first murder was indeed, just as Treviranus had suspected, a bungled robbery. The man who turned out to be the second victim, Daniel Azevedo, attempting to double-cross the other members of Scharlach's gang and steal the jewels, entered the rabbi's room by mistake and had to kill him. Reading about Lönnrot's investigation in the newspaper, Scharlach hatched a plan to catch him, and thereby gain revenge on an old adversary: ‘I swore by the god who looks with two faces and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors that I would weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother’ (Borges, 1989, 115). Knowing Lönnrot's fondness for a ‘rabbinical explanation’ Scharlach plants clues that will seem to the detective to confirm his theory about the murders being aligned to the Tetragrammaton. He kills the double-crosser Azevedo and himself pretends to be Gryphius-Ginzberg in locations which will prompt in Lönnrot's mind associations with the figure of a diamond, which in arcane theology signifies the mirror-relationship between God (the upper triangle of the diamond) and the universe (the lower triangle). Despite Lönnrot's attempts to have the last word by telling Scharlach that in his labyrinth ‘there are three lines too many’, Scharlach shoots him dead.
Its introduction, ostensibly written by Eco himself to explain how he came by the manuscript and how it has, over the centuries, been subject to numerous retranslations, rewritings, and the addition of supplements, signals clearly to the reader the problem of determining truth if it is embedded inside a text. This is exacerbated by the fact Eco presents his story as a translation of a text which has already been translated: ‘On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk towards the end of the fourteenth century’ (Eco, 1984, 15). In other words, as Eco put it later, Adso's narrative exists ‘on a fourth level of encasement, inside three other narratives: I am saying what Vallet said that Mabillon said that Adso said…’ (Eco, 1985, 20).
Just as Adso's own text has ostensibly been continually lost and found again, so the plot itself revolves around a lost text, namely the second volume of Aristotle's Poetics (on comedy) about which academic speculation has been intense, for its existence would perhaps have had profound consequences for Western aesthetics. The novel is set in an Italian monastery in 1327, where two familiar generic archetypes – transported back in time 500 years before the advent of detective fiction proper – are summoned following the murder of one of the monks. The Sherlock Holmes figure is a Franciscan monk named Sir William of Baskerville (again, note the in-joke), capable of brilliant deductive ‘introductory exercises’ like his ancestor/descendant, while his apprentice Adso of Melk, like Watson, accompanies the detective and narrates the story. As in ‘Death and the Compass’ a series of apparently linked murders follow the initial one, though there are five this time, and the mystery deepens. While the monks in the Abbey are convinced that the murders are evidence of demonic possession in the face of the Second Coming of Christ, Sir William chooses to seek a solution through the familiar methods of classic detective fiction, empirical reasoning, and deduction.
Yet one of the ironies of The Name of the Rose is that while Sir William's methods solve numerous mysteries (e.g. discovering the identity of the lost Aristotle text, cracking the code of a secret message written by Venantius, and figuring out the complex structure of the labyrinthine library), when it comes to the sequence of murders, he is defeated. Like Lönnrot, he assumes that there is a pattern to the murders based upon the biblical narrative of the Apocalypse, but turns out to be quite mistaken. Nevertheless, his mistakes do lead him to the master-criminal Jorge, and his vast labyrinthine library. This is the supreme irony: it is only as a result of his misreading of the case that he is able to arrive at the heart of the labyrinth. Sir William delivers a dénouement which (in an ironic reversal of the detective tradition) explains his own errors:
In Eco's Reflections on The Name of the Rose, which I have often referred to in this book, he notes that the experience of writing The Name of the Rose led him to rediscover ‘what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told’ (Eco, 1985, 20). His switch from writing criticism to writing fiction actually strengthens his literary-critical conviction that a novel ‘is a machine for generating interpretations’ (Eco, 1985, 8). Maintaining this principle – in fact trying to ensure that the reader is disoriented by the mass of signifiers within his text – was central to his aim in writing the novel.
It is this logic which determined his choice of title. Aware that a book's title plays a significant role in shaping the reader's interpretations of the text, he initially planned to short-circuit the process by titling the novel Adso of Melk, after its narrator – an ambition which, not surprisingly, dismayed his publisher. But he liked The Name of the Rose, ‘because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it has hardly any meaning left: Dante's mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name, a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicrucians’ (Eco, 1985, 3). This overload of signification means the title is less about the actual case narrated in the novel, and more about semiotics: the name of the rose is its signifier, but its signifieds are multiple, so much so that they indicate how words refer simply to other words and little else. In demonstrating the polysemy of language generally and fiction specifically, The Name of the Rose makes its reader duplicate the activity engaged in by its detective. Arriving at a ‘final’ interpretation of the novel by imposing upon its patterns of meaning a decisive set of signifieds, is impossible. The network of allusions is so densely wrought that there are potentially hundreds of lines of enquiry which the reader may choose to follow – a veritable labyrinth of potential meaning.
Eco argues that the popularity of detective fiction is precisely because the genre as a whole – not just later parodies of the classic works – raises the kind of questions regarded as definitive of the ‘metaphysical’ tradition. It is not because detective fiction enables readers to confront death in a displaced manner nor derive consolation from the ‘modernist’ closure of the text. Rather it is because, like medical diagnosis, scientific research, and philosophy, ‘the crime novel represents a kind of conjecture, pure and simple’ – and its revelation gratifies us because ‘[e]very story of investigation and conjecture tells us something that we have always been close to knowing’ (Eco, 1985, 54).
This is where we can return to the comparison of different kinds of maze Eco develops in Reflections on The Name of the Rose, and which we considered in Chapter 1. For Eco, seeking satisfaction – perhaps even truth – via conjecture works like entering a labyrinth and trying to find the exit. Where sometimes this process is completely straightforward, as in Theseus's labyrinth, and in other labyrinths, like the ‘mannerist maze’(Eco, 1985, 57), more complex but still possible through trial and error, the most baffling and powerful kind of labyrinth is the ‘rhizomatic’ one, with ‘no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite’ and ‘so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one’ (Eco, 1985, 57).
Whether or not we subscribe to the implication here that the patterns of conjecture involved in detective fiction makes the genre ‘rhizomatic’ by definition, it certainly explains the effect of postmodern detective fiction – and, by extension (as we have explored in Chapter 1), postmodern narrative as a whole. Eco describes his own novel by claiming that its library is ‘still a mannerist labyrinth’ (Eco, 1985, 57) (after all, Sir William can work it out) but that ‘the world in which William realizes he is living already has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but is never structured definitively’ (Eco, 1985, 58). This is indeed the effect of The Name of the Rose, which sends the reader on a constant chase for clues, parodying the entire experience of reading detective fiction, all while it lets him or her indulge in it.
The idea that the experience of reading detective fiction makes a cognitive point ‘emotionally’, or via the senses rather than the mind, is a significant one when it comes to postmodern fiction. This was the central point made in one of the first essays to examine the ‘anti-detective’ story in the context of postmodernism, William Spanos's 1972 essay ‘The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination’, an interesting complement to Susan Sontag's call for an ‘erotics’ rather than a hermeneutics of literature (which we considered in Chapter 1).
Spanos argues that postmodern detective fiction makes the same point as anti-rationalist philosophy, but does so through its form rather than through argument, refusing the satisfactory closure of the conventional detective novel and thereby rejecting the Enlightenment faith in teleology (Spanos, 2002).
Spanos's view that we feel the anti-rationalism in fiction where we process it cognitively in philosophy applies to another paradigmatic example of the postmodern detective story – Paul Auster's slim novel, City of Glass, first published thirteen years after Spanos's theory, in 1985. The novel is the first in a sequence of ‘metaphysical’ detective stories known as The New York Trilogy, and is followed by Ghosts and The Locked Room (both 1986), each of which draw inventively on detective conventions – not just the classic British analytic model, but also the ‘hard-boiled’ US tradition. In fact, City of Glass is perhaps the most ‘canonical’ postmodern detective fiction, and one reason for this is that it interrogates the connection between reading and detective fiction persistently, suggestively, and (in a surprising way) movingly. It does so through the simple premise of telling the story of a man fascinated by detective fiction who takes on a case as a real detective. Its hero is a fusion of the amateur, ‘armchair’ detective who tries to solve a puzzle, familiar from Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie texts, with the professional American private investigator who pounds the mean streets in search of a missing person.
Daniel Quinn is a writer of detective stories and also an avid reader of the genre, someone who loves detective stories because of,
their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.…The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective's eye, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time.
(Auster, 1987, 8)
At a low point in his life following the failure of his marriage, and looking to escape the literary world, Quinn starts to receive misdirected telephone calls asking urgently to be put in touch with a private detective, one ‘Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency’ (Auster, 1987, 7). After dismissing them initially, he impulsively pretends he is a real detective and takes on the case, drawing on the knowledge of detective conventions he has gained from writing and reading detective fiction.
The metafictional effect of the novel is immediately clear: what we have is a writer of detective fiction, masquerading as Paul Auster – someone, moreover, who writes under the nom-de-plume William Wilson, the name of a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story who is the narrator's uncanny double. This, we recall, is a clear example of metafiction's capacity to destabilize ontological boundaries, for reading Auster's name in the story makes us question whether Auster is really the novelist or whether the story is not fiction but true. At one point, Quinn meets ‘Auster’, complete with the author’s real-life wife and son, and discusses with him the question of authorship in Don Quixote (as Quinn later reflects, he shares his initials with Cervantes's character). The considerable network of intertextual references in City of Glass, including, for example, references to Melville and Hammett, extends the metafictional dimension of Auster's story, emphasizing that this is a novel about novels rather than anything in the ‘real’ world.
Initially Quinn's task is to protect a certain Peter Stillman from his deranged father, also called Peter Stillman, who has gone missing. But the quest to find him is doomed practically from the outset. Lying in wait for him at Grand Central Station in New York Quinn encounters two apparently identical suspects and realizes, to his horror, that ‘[t]here was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made – and he had to make a choice – would be arbitrary, a submission to chance’. Nevertheless, he chooses one (the second), a ‘shuffling…shabby creature, …broken down and disconnected from his surroundings’ (Auster, 1987, 56) and then tails him over the course of several weeks, waiting outside his apartment each day for him to emerge, and obsessively recording his movements in a red notebook he has bought, until eventually, having given up everything – home, health, sanity – in the pursuit, and convinced that ‘the only thing he felt now was the man's impenetrability’ (67), Quinn becomes a shabby tramp-like figure himself.
The novel ends enigmatically with a description of Quinn's last days lying on the floor in the Stillman's empty apartment, sleeping, hallucinating that he is being provided with delicious meals, and continuing to write down his thoughts. Finally the narrator – hitherto remaining in the background, now becoming more visible – reports on Quinn's disappearance, and his and ‘Auster's’ efforts to find out what happened to him. They visit the apartment themselves and find only the red notebook, the last sentence of which reads, ‘What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?’ (131). This, of course, is a neat self-reflexive ending, as we have a fictional character who disappears once the words run out, that is, once the author has stopped writing him into existence. But Auster's work contains a poignancy that is more powerful than the kind of playful self-reflexive literary games associated with an earlier generation of American metafictional writers, such as Coover and Barth.
Like other postmodern detective stories, City of Glass works as a critique of rationalist – or ‘paranoid’ – reading strategies. But what is especially interesting about Auster's novel in the context of detective fiction, as Jeffrey Nealon has argued, is what it says about writing and the process of detection. In his influential essay on the genre, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, Tzvetan Todorov (drawing on a 1926 article by the detective writer S. S. Van Dine) posits a homology that aligns the author with the criminal rather than the detective: ‘author : reader = criminal : detective’ (Todorov, 1977, 49). However, Nealon contends that Auster's trilogy shows that although the author is the one who establishes the labyrinthine plot into which the reader must enter, s/he is also ‘the one who searches – perhaps more desperately than the reader – for its end, for [to quote City of Glass] “the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them”’ (Nealon, 1999, 118). ‘For the reader’, Nealon writes, ‘the mystery always ends, regardless of whether it is solved.…No such luxury is available to the writer or the detective. Once they enter the space of the mystery, there is no guarantee of an ordered conclusion – no guarantee even of the closure afforded the reader by the final period placed after the final sentence’ (Nealon, 1999, 118). The detective is the person who is faced with apparently random and unconnected phenomena: a death, for example, and a range of clues. His job is ultimately to show that these apparently chance elements link together into a meaningful narrative which can uncover the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime, and the identity of the criminal.
More than an interrogation of reading, Quinn's engagement with the Stillman case is actually a dramatization of the act of writing, of trying to make some kind of narrative sense out of the chaos of the world. As with other examples of metafiction, Auster's strategy here is to make the metaphorical literal – more precisely, in the case of City of Glass, the analogy between writing and detective-work. For Quinn, in fact, these activities become more than analogous but progressively indistinguishable from one another. Once he has purchased his red notebook Quinn becomes obsessed with recording everything Stillman does, to the point at which he takes to writing while actually following him, making notes while walking. While this is obviously a source of pathos, it is also ironic that the very job Quinn took on to escape a purely textual world has ultimately entailed returning to it more directly and desperately than ever.
Auster's novel is influenced by the work of the literary philosopher Maurice Blanchot (whose work Auster translated in the 1970s). Though not a postmodernist theorist, Blanchot's thinking bears an interesting relationship to the postmodern. It begins with the assumption that we are living in a ‘time of transition’ between an earlier world where the ‘human condition’ could be understood by reference to God, and our own ‘absurdist’, post-religious – we might say, postmodern – culture. Against this background, Blanchot considers what we might call the mystery of literature. Why do we write? Why does what is written have such a strange power over us? Writing is strange, he insists, because it does not refer to the world (though it is naturally assumed that it does) yet exists as part of it. This means that literature exists independently of the writer's own existence: though it is produced by the writer, what is written also takes its place as a separate entity in the world (Blanchot, 1989).
A positive effect of this independence is that writing can ensure a certain kind of immortality for the writer, as he or she ‘lives on’ posthumously through his or her achievements. More disturbingly, though, it means that writing makes the writer's existence irrelevant, for his or her work can be read without any reference to himself or herself.
The act of writing, then, for Blanchot, is tantamount to confronting one's own non-existence. This accounts for the impulse to write and the curious consequences for our own sense of identity when we do so – what Blanchot refers to as the ‘demand of writing’. This notion leads him to distinguish between the ‘book’ and the ‘work’, concepts which might usefully be seen as the counterpart of Roland Barthes's opposition between ‘work’ and ‘text’, except that it uses how something is written rather than read as the basis for the distinction. For Blanchot, the book is the object that we buy in the shop, and is what we read and write about: it bears the author's name and is bound up with the network of cultural meaning and economic exchange that characterizes the everyday modern world. The ‘work’, on the other hand, is what is produced by responding to the ‘demand of writing’; it is the space into which the writer ‘disappears’. From a Blanchotian perspective, it is the work rather than the book to which Kafka and, to a lesser extent, Beckett are concerned with.
Blanchot's distinction between work and book can be felt behind City of Glass, which on one level is nothing other than a dramatization of Blanchot's idea of the mystery of ‘the work’. It is significant that Quinn's detective – from whom he is trying to escape – is named ‘Max Work’. While Quinn's failure in detective-work amounts to a clear failure of reading (that is, an inability to decode the ambiguous signifiers his case presents him with) it is more fully the result of entering into a kind of writing. This aspect distinguishes Auster's The New York Trilogy from other ‘canonical’ works of metaphysical detective fiction, such as ‘Death and the Compass’ or The Name of the Rose, in that his detectives are to be envisaged as surrogate writers rather than simply readers. As he becomes lost in the labyrinthine plot of his case Quinn resembles the writer surrendering to the force of the Blanchotian ‘work’. He is never sure of where his writing will take him.