From Holmes to Sherlock

252 Pages·2013·2.52 MB·English

by  Arundhati Ghosh

FROM HOLMES TO SHERLOCK: CONFESSION, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE DETECTIVE
Arundhati Ghosh
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green
State University in partial fulfillment of
the requirements of the degrees of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
December 2013
Committee:
Ellen Berry, Committee Chair

Valeria Grinberg-Pla
Graduate College Representative
© 2013
Arundhati Ghosh
All Rights Reserved
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ABSTRACT
Dr. Ellen Berry, Committee Chair
This dissertation examines detective fiction through the prism of confession. It
argues that a certain kind of secular confession remains at the heart of the main project of
detective fiction, and that detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are literary
embodiments of secular pastor figures who command and extract confessions from
clients and criminals alike. Hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe moreover,
operate, at least ostensibly, as confessants of sorts, as characters who lay before us, in
seeming detail, all manners of private information related to their professional and
personal lives. Similarly, post-modern detectives like Quinn from Paul Auster’s City of
Glass or Galip from Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, as well as contemporary television
detectives like those from BBC’s Sherlock challenge, revise, and reformat the way in
which detective fiction engages with confession and its paradigms. Confession, in
detective fiction, is something that both powers the detective and determines his powers.
The dissertation chooses to study it in relation to a certain kind of intrusive surveillance
that seeks to create the truth not only about those it purports to serve but also, by
implication, about the confessor/confessant detectives themselves. The dissertation
argues that the detective is one of the most useful fliterary figure through which to
examine the dynamic relation between surveillance and confession, since the private
detective has by turns operated both as the seemingly all-seeing “eye” which induces
confession, as well as the seemingly all-divulging “I” of the narrator who is offering the
confession. If, as Michel Foucault posits, Western man has become a confessing
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animal, then detective fiction provides an appropriate avenue to study the evolution of
the subjectivity of this confessional animal through the ages and the purpose of this
dissertation is to trace the evolution of the confessional subjectivity through the
changing figure of the literary detective and examine the socio-cultural implications of
that evolving confessional subjectivity.
Confession, in this dissertation, is seen as a disciplinary mechanism that creates
rather than states an irrepressible truth about a subject. It is something intrinsically linked
not only to the self, but also to expressions of power, authority, and surveillance. It
studies the changing relationship between “truth,” “self,” and confession in detective
fiction. Given detective fiction’s fetishistic relationship towards the or at least a “truth”
that reveals all, discloses all, dispels doubts, it becomes interesting to study its
dependence and engagement with confession , which is at best, a deeply complex,
complicated venue for truth creation and self revelation. This constant tension between,
on the one hand, an obsessive and indeed generic need to ascertain a unique, authentic,
undisputed, and singular truth, and yet, on the other hand, an inherently unreliable mode
of self-expression, is something that this dissertation purports to examine and explore.
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For Borobaba and Dadu.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply indebted to my committee, Dr. Ellen Berry, Dr. Don Callen, Dr. Piya
Pal-Lapinsky and Dr. Valeria Grinberg-Pla for encouraging and challenging me
throughout the dissertation writing process. I have been extremely fortunate to have had
a committee I truly look up to, admire, and whose advice I hold so dear. I also owe a lot
to all my professors at Jadavpur University, Department of English for providing me with
the tools required to survive a doctoral programme far away from hearth and home.
Thank you, for training me, teaching me, and always inspiring me.
My undying gratitude remains for my friends in Kolkata, Bowling Green, and
elsewhere who provided much needed support, peels of hysterical laughter, and hours of
sparkling conversation, not to mention food, shelter, and clothing. Moreover, all my
affection to Russell, Lucy, and Nimbus, wonder cats all, for providing much needed
distractions, love, and loathing, and for trampling all over my keyboard but never
pressing Ctrl Del (and for always reminding me to keep saving my work).
Finally, for always providing care, concern, unconditional support, routine
admonitions, and well, pretty much everything, my endless love to my family,
particularly my dearest didu, my beloved baba, my darling sister who I love in a way
one can only love one’s sister, and the kindest, most beautiful woman I know—my
mother.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1
“TELL ME EVERYTHING”:
THE RISE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES AS SECULAR CONFESSOR ............................... 13
CHAPTER 2
“HERCULE POIROT INTENDS TO KNOW”:
CONFESSION AND TRUTH IN THE GOLDEN AGE ...................................................... 82
CHAPTER 3
HARD- BOILED MISOGYNY:
PHILLIP MARLOWE AS THE CONFESSING DETECTIVE ........................................... 123
CHAPTER 4
THE GREAT FALL:
THE POSTMODERN (MIS) ADVENTURES OF THE INCREDIBLE DETECTIVE ...... 177
CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................................... 225
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 234
1
INTRODUCTION

“Give me a true account of all that happened….a TRUE account, mind you, with nothing added
and nothing taken off”
—Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” 1

“It was close to 11:00 when I got back to my apartment. I’d concealed a murder and suppressed
evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and nobody seemed unduly worried.”
—Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep 2

The two quotes above—the first, a typical command stated by Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes to his client asking them to lay before him everything they know about a
certain event in their lives, and the second, an equally typical first-person account by Raymond
Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe narrating his own illicit and illegal actions—
capture some of the basic purposes of this dissertation. This dissertation examines detective
fiction through the prism of confession. It argues that a certain kind of secular confession
remains at the heart of the main project of detective fiction, and that detectives like Sherlock
Holmes and Hercule Poirot are literary embodiments of secular pastor figures who command and
extract confessions from clients and criminals alike. Hard-boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe
moreover, operate, at least ostensibly, as confessants of sorts, as characters who lay before us, in
seeming detail, all manners of private information related to their professional and personal lives.
Confession, in detective fiction, is something that both powers the detective and determines his
powers. It must be studied, however, in detective fiction, in relation to a certain kind of intrusive
1 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” The Return of Sherlock Holmes, (Project Gutenberg,
2007), accessed July 28, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/108/108-h/108-h.htm#linkH2H_4_0012 .
2 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, (Project Gutenberg, 2011), accessed July 28, 2013,
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/chandlerr-bigsleep/chandlerr-bigsleep-00-h.html.
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surveillance that seeks to create the truth not only about those it purports to serve but also, by
implication, about the confessor/confessant detective themselves. The detective, then, becomes
the most useful figure through which to examine the dynamic relation between surveillance and
confession, since the private detective has by turns operated both as the seemingly all-seeing
“eye” which induces confession, as well as the seemingly all-divulging “I” of the narrator who is
offering the confession. Indeed confession, as a narrative mode or simply as a plot device is
ubiquitous in detective fiction. However, there really has not been any critical or academic
consideration of the significance of this aspect of the genre. If, as Michel Foucault posits,
“Western man has become a confessing animal,”3 then detective fiction provides an appropriate
avenue to study the evolution of the subjectivity of the confessional animal through the ages.
It should be clarified that “confession, then, is not a means of expressing the irrepressible
truth of prior lived experience.”4 Confession here is largely seen as a disciplinary device linked
to intrusive but subtle surveillance techniques. I see confession, following Foucault, as “a ritual
that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence, or virtual
presence, of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the
confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive,
console, and reconcile.”5 Confession, as discussed here, is a truth creating mechanism,
something that creates rather than states an irrepressible truth. It is, in many circumstances,
usually provided or constructed under duress, rather than a free expression of the self. It is
“poietic not mimetic, it constructs rather than reflects some pre-textual truth.”6 It is something
3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random
House, 1978), 59.
4 Jo Gill, “Introduction,” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill (Oxford: Routledge, 2006),
4.
5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, 61-62.
6 Jo Gill, “Introduction,” Modern Confessional Writing, 4.
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intrinsically linked not only to the self, but also to expressions of power, authority, and
surveillance.
Of course, this makes the dissertation full of potential pitfalls, for, “To think about
confession is, paradoxically given confession’s apparent proximity to truthful revelation, to enter
into profound uncertainty….To think about confession is to abandon conventional and hitherto
dependable notions of reliability, authority and authenticity and to embrace, and find new ways
of addressing, the difficulty and slipperiness.”7 This is ironic and perhaps only fitting given that
detective fiction is a genre which is entirely oriented towards dispelling the unreliable, the
uncertain, and the doubtful, and towards leading the reader to what it insists to be the absolute,
undeniable truth. This constant tension between, on the one hand, an obsessive and indeed
generic need to ascertain a unique, authentic, undisputed, and singular truth, and yet, on the other
hand, an inherently unreliable mode of self-expression is something that can be found barely
under the surface of most detective fiction, always threatening to burst out and submerge the
entire narrative. In spite of confession being something that deals with the obscure and the
secretive and difficult to express or incite, in the west, at least, it has long been associated with
the “truth” and the “self,” or as a means by which one may get to the truth of the self. Indeed, it
is confession’s purported proximity with a supposed truth that makes it so important strategically
to detective fiction, which must always be geared towards it.
Confession is today pervasive, to be found not only in church practices, but in literature,
be they confessional poetry, autobiographies, memoirs, or simply the liberal use of the first
person voice; in television, in chat shows or “reality” shows; online, in blogs, video blogs, and
7 Jo Gill, “Introduction,” Modern Confessional Writing, 1.