PART IA) NARRATIVE UNRELIABILITY

41 Pages·2012·0.54 MB·English

PART I

A) NARRATIVE UNRELIABILITY – and the detective novel

Autore reale→ Autore implicito → (Narratore) → (Narratario) → Lettore implicito →
Lettore reale

From Agatha Christie, The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

1) Incipit:

Mrs Ferrars died on the night of the 16th-17th September – a Thursday. I was sent for at eight
o‘clock on the morning of Friday the 17th. There was nothing to be done. She had been dead some
hours. It was just a few minutes after nine when I reached home once more. I opened the front door
with my latchkey, and purposely delayed a few moments in the hall, hanging up my hat and the
light overcoat that I had deemed a wise precaution against the chill of an early autumn morning. To
tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that
moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so. But my
instincts told me that there were stirring times ahead.

2) Chapter 23 – Poirot‘s Little Reunion

‗Well, as a matter of fact, I‘ve read some of Captain Hastings‘s narratives, and I thought, why not
try my hand at something of the same kind. Seemed a pity not to – unique opportunity – probably
the only time I‘ll be mixed up with anything of this kind.‘
I felt myself getting hotter and hotter, and more and more incoherent, as I floundered through
the above speech.

3) Metatextuality:

Still somewhat doubtful, I rummaged in the drawers of my desk and produced an unitidy pile of
manuscript which I handed over to him. With an eye on possible publication in the future, I had
divided the work into chapters, and the night before I had brought it up to date with an account of
Miss Russell‘s visit. Poirot had therefore twenty chapters.
‗Eh bien,‘ he said, ‗I congratulate you – on your modesty!‘
‗Oh!? I said, rather taken aback.
‗And on your reticence,‘ he added.
I said ‗Oh!‘ again.
‗Not so did Hastings write,‘ continued my friend. ‗On every page, many, many times was the word
«I». What he thought – what he did. But you – you have kept your personality in the
background; only once or twice does it obtrude – in scenes of home life, shall we say?»
‗A very meticulous and accurate account,‘ he said kindly. ‗You have recorded all the facts
faithfully and exactly – though you have shown yourself becomingly reticent as to your own share
in them.‘

4) The whole Truth

I was puzzled. For the first time I was absolutely at sea as to Poirot‘s meaning. For a moment I was
inclined to think that the scene I had just witnessed as a gigantic piece of bombast – that he had
been what he called ‗playing the comedy‘ with a view to making himself interesting and important.
But, in spite of myself, I was forced to believe in an underlying reality. There had been real menace
in his words – a certain indisputable sincerity. But I still believed him to be on entirely the wrong
track.

5) Chapter 26 – And nothing but the truth

It was the little discrepancy in time that first drew my attention to you – right at the beginning.‘
‗Discrepancy in time?‘ I queried, puzzled.
But yes. You will remember that everyone agreed – you yourself included – that it took five
minutes to walk from the lodge to the house – less if you took the short cut to the terrace. But you
left the house at ten minutes to nine – both by your own statement and that of Parker, and yet it was
nine o‘clock when you passed through the lodge gates. It was a chilly night – not an evening a man
would be inclined to dawdle; why had you taken ten minutes to do a five minutes‘ walk? All along I
realized that we had only your statement for it that the study window was ever fastened.
I should suggest that you finish that very interesting manuscript of yours – but abandoning your
former reticence.

6) Chapter 27 – Apologia

Five A.M. I am very tired – but I have finished my task. My arm aches from writing.
A strange end to my manuscript – I meant it to be published some day as the history of one of
Poirot‘s failures! Odd how things pan out.

7) Metatextuality

I am rather pleased with myself as a writer . What could be neater, for instance, than the following:
‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left
him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and
wondering if there was anything I had left undone’.
All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody
then have wondered what exactly happened in the blank ten minutes?
[The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine.*******]

8) Filling the gaps

When I looked round the room from the door, I was quite satisfied. Nothing had been left undone.
The dictaphone was on the table by the window, timed to go off at nine-thirty (the mechanism of
that little device was quite clever – based on the principle of an alarm clock), and the armchair was
pulled out so as to hide it from the door.

9) Metatextuality

I must admit that it gave me rather a shock to run into Parker just outside the door. I have faithfully
recorded that.
Then later, when the body was discovered, and I sent Parker to telephone for the police, what a
judicious use of words: ‗I did what little had to be done!‘ It was quite little – just to shove the
dictaphone into my bag and push back the chair against the wall in its proper place.

B) UNRELIABILITY: detection and the theatre

Autore
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Spettatori

Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap (1952)

Unreliable Statements:
Trotter: Those were the statements you made. I had no means of checking these statements. They
may be true – they may not. To put it quite clearly, five of those statements are true, but one is false
– which one? [….] Five of you were speaking the truth, one of you was lying. I have a plan that
may help me to discover the liar. And if I discover that one of you lied to me – then I know who the
murderer is.
Miss Caswell: Not necessarily. Someone may have lied – for some other reason.
Mollie: I thought the police don‘t carry revolvers […]
Totter: The police don‘t… I‘m not a policeman, Mrs Ralston. You thought I was a policeman
because I rang up from a call box and said I was speaking from police headquarters and that
Sergeant Trotter was on his way. I cut the telephone wires before I came to the front door. You
know who I am, Mrs Ralston? I‘m George – I‘m Jimmy‘s brother, George.
Miss Casewell: Georgie, Georgie, you know me, don‘t you? Don‘t you remember the farm,
Georgie? The animals, that fat old pig, and the day the bull chased us across the field. And the dogs.
Trotter: Dogs?
Miss Casewel: Yes, spot and Plain
Trotter: Kathy?
Miss Casewell: Ye, Kathy – you remember me now, don‘t you?
Trotter: Kathy, it is you. What are you doing here?
Miss Casewell: I came to England to find you. I didn‘t recognize you until you twirled your hair the
way you alway used to.

C) The Detective Novel

1) Ronald Knox, Detective Decalogue (1929)

1) The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone
whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2) All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3) No Chinaman must figure in the story.
4) No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition
which proves to be right.
5) The detective must not himself commit the crime.
6) The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of
the reader.
7) The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass
through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average
reader.
8) The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of
the reader.
9) The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass
through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average
reader.
10) Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for
them.

2) Charles Van Dine, Twenty rules for writing detective stories (1928)

THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for
the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less
binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.
Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective
stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:
1) The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues
must be plainly stated and described.
2) No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played
legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
3) There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice,
not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.
4) The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the
culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold
piece. It's false pretenses.
5) The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or
unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader
on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of
his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.
6) The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he
detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty
work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of
those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the
back of the arithmetic.
7) There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No
lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other
than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.
8) The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for
learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances, crystal-gazing,
and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective,
but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of
metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.
9) There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex
machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a
problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair
advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his
codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.
10) The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the
story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.
11) A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is
a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't
ordinarily come under suspicion.
12) There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may,
of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders:
the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.
13) Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and
truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the
murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him
a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.
14) The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific.
That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated
in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner,
he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.
15) The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd
enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime,
should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-
that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he
could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader
does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.
16) A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-
issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. Such
matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and
introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring
it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and
character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.
17) A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story.
Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors
and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church,
or a spinster noted for her charities.
18) A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an
odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.
19) The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and
war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a
murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences,
and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.
20) And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no
self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often,
and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's
ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the
butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus
spiritualistic seance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The
dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is
familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the
suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The
commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word
association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

3) G.K. Chesterton, A Defence of Detective Story (The Defendant, chap. 15, 1901)

By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us
that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the
children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police
romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves'
kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the
original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic
conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the
police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most
dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police
management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.

4)

[…] il tema unificante della cultura vittoriana è, ai vari livelli della sua produzione artistica, la lotta
contro la disarmonia. Una lotta che significa l‘ossessiva riaffermazione del primato di un ordine
grazie al quale costruire i paradigmi etico-comportamentali da proporre alle classi inquiete della
nazione.
(Francesco Marroni, Disarmonie Vittoriane)

[…] l‘etica protestante esige la punizione del male e il trionfo del bene. A tal fine si devono
adoperare non solo le istituzioni, ma anche il singolo ispirato dalla grazia divina.
(Max Weber, L’etica protestante e lo spirito del capitalismo)

Lo scrittore vittoriano deve essere una sorta di ―funzionario ed ‗addetto alla cultura‘ nei confronti
delle masse in via di acculturazione‖, uno ―strumento di partecipazione sociale e del consenso,
corresponsabile della integrazione sociale delle lower classes‖.
(Franco Marucci, Il Vittorianesimo)

5) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899-1902)

He was an unshaven little man in a thread-bare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and I
thought him a harmless fool. ‗I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of
those going out there,‘ he said. ‗And when they come back too?‘ I asked. ‗Oh, I never see them,‘ he
remarked; ‗and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.‘

6) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

«They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts of him, as if facts could explain everything!»
«Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them was purely psychological – the
expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human
emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be disclosed»
«My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be
dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing: Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your
minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your
bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions – and safe – and
profitable – and dull»

7)

La letteratura di massa «lavora sulle opinioni comuni, sugli endoxa, e quindi funziona come una
continua riconferma di ciò che noi già pensiamo»
(Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati)

Il romanzo popolare non inventa situazioni narrative originali, ma combina un repertorio di
situazioni ―topiche‖ già riconosciute, accettate, amate dal proprio pubblico: lo caratterizza questa
attenzione alla richiesta implicita dei lettori, come accade oggi per il romanzo giallo. I lettori dal
canto proprio chiedono al romanzo popolare (che è uno strumento di divertimento e di evasione)
non tanto di proporgli nuove esperienze formali o rovesciamento drammatici e problematici dei
sistemi e valori vigenti, ma esattamente il contrario: di ribadire sistemi di attese assestati e integrati
alla cultura corrente.
(Umberto Eco, Il superuomo di massa)

Il romanzo poliziesco ha le sue norme; fare meglio di quanto esse richiedano significa fare meno
bene: chi vuole abbellire il romanzo poliziesco fa letteratura, non fa un romanzo poliziesco. Il
romanzo poliziesco per eccellenza non è quello che trasgredisce le regole del genere, ma quello che
ad esse si conforma.
(Tzvetan Todorov, ‗Il romanzo poliziesco‘)

D) Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)

1) Explicit

So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will
be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!

2) The moonstone

When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it
so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between
your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and
then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with
a moony gleam, in the dark.

3) Prefaces

The Woman in White (1960): ―[…] it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting
characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can
be effectively told"

The Moonstone (1968): ―[…] to trace the influence of character on circumstances―

―I have declined to avail myself of the novelist's privilege of supposing something which might
have happened, and have so shaped the story as to make it grow out of what actually would
which, I beg to inform my readers, is also what actually does happen, in these pages.‖
―In the case of the physiological experiment which occupies a prominent place in the closing
scenes of The Moonstone, the same principle has guided me once more.... [I have] first ascertained,
not only from books, but from living authorities as well, what the results of that experiment
would really have been.―

4) Why this story?

[T]he characters of innocent people have suffered under suspicion already... . The memories of
innocent people may suffer, hereafter, for want of a record of the facts to which those who come
after us can appeal. There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told.
We have certain events to relate . . . and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are
capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the
story of the Moonstone in turn as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther.

5: Franklin Blake

Franklin: There was no mistaking the expression on her face [Limping Lucy]. I inspired her with
the strongest emotions of abhorrence and disgust. Let me not be vain enough to say that no woman
had ever looked at me in this manner before. I will only venture on the more modest assertion that
no woman had ever let me perceive it yet.
Limping Lucy: I can't find out what she [Rosanna] saw in his face. I can't guess what she heard in
his voice.... Oh, my lost darling! what could you see in this man? She lifted her head again fiercely,
and looked at me once more. "Can you eat and drink. . . ? Can you sleep?‖
Franklin: "I did my best to preserve my gravity.‖
Lucy: "When you see a poor girl in service, do you feel no remorse?"
Franklin: "Certainly not. Why should I?"
The one interpretation that I could put on her conduct has, no doubt, already been anticipated by
everybody. I could only suppose that she was mad. . . . Having reached that inevitable
conclusion, I turned to the more interesting object of investigation which was presented to me by
Rosanna Spearman's letter.

6: Jennings‘s Journal

Admitted principles, and recognized authorities, justify me in the view that I take. Give me five
minutes of your attention; and I will undertake to show you that Science sanctions my proposal,
fanciful as it may seem. Here in the first place, is the physiological principle on which I am acting,
stated by no less a person that Dr. Carpenter. Read it for yourself....
[R]ead that account of a case, which has – as I believe – a direct bearing on your own position, and
on the experiment which I am tempting you to try. Observe, Mr Blake, before you begin, that I am
now referring you to one of the greatest of English physiologists. The book in your hand is Doctor
Elliotson's Human Physiology … Are you satisfied that I have not spoken without good authority
supporting me? ... If not, I have only to go to those bookshelves, and you have only to read the
passages which I can point out to you.
7: Ezra Jennings

Judging him by his figure and movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and
comparing him to Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of gypsy
darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a
pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient
people of the East. . . . From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown – eyes
dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits – looked out at you, and (in my case, at
least) took your attention captive at their will.
‗You don‘t seem to like him, Betteredge?‘
‗Nobody likes him, sir‘
‗Why is he so unpopular?‘
‗Well, Mr Franklin, his appearance is against him, to begin with. And then there‘s a story that Mr
Candy took him with a very doubtful character. Nobody knows who he is – and he hasn‘t a friend
in the place. How can you expect one to like him, after that?‘
‗I have mentioned an accusation that has rested with me for years. There are circumstances in
connection with it that tell against me. I cannot bring myself to acknowledge what the accusation is.
And I am incapable, perfectly incapable, of proving my innocence. I can only assert my
innocence. I assert it, sir, on my oath, as a Christian. It is useless to appeal to honour as a man.‘

8: The Shivering Sands

Between the two [rocks], shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the
most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in
the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in
a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given it... the name of the Shivering Sand.
I saw the preliminary heaving of the Sand, and then the awful shiver that crept over its surface – as
if some spirit of terror lived and moved and shuddered in the fathomless depths beneath. . . . The
sight of it so near me, still disturbed at intervals by its hideous shivering fit, shook my nerves. ... A
horrible fancy that the dead woman might appear on the scene of the suicide, to assist my search –
an unutterable dread of seeing her rise through the heavy surface of the sand, and point to the place
– forced itself into my mind, and turned me cold in the warm sunlight.

9: East/West

Bruff: ‗If the moonstone had been in my possession, this Oriental gentleman would have murdered
me, I am well aware, without a moment‘s hesitation. At the same time, and barring that slight
drawback, I am bound to testify that he was the perfect model of a client. He might not have
respected my life. But he did none of my own countrymen had aver done, in all my experience of
them – he respected my time.‘
Mr Luker was, in every respect, such an inferior creature to the Indian – he was so vulgar, so
ugly, so cringing, and so prosy – that he is quite unworthy of being reported, at any length in
these pages.