FR405 French Crime Fiction

1. FR405French Crime Fiction Lecture 2

2. European modernity • Detective: ‘flâneur-artiste-homme du monde-in-spector’ • Genre: ‘based on a model of learningthatisbothveryancient and modern’ (Carlo Ginzburg) • Epistemological shift and the emergence of the crime genre •  epistemology: What can we know and how do we know it?’ Knowledge and representations are historically embedded. Technological advances and their impact on how we see, think, and represent the world • Second empire: shift to mass-consumerism and idea of endless reproducibility

3. Literature and consumption; literature of consumption Il y a cette relation bien connue entre voyage en train et consommation du policier. On ne lisait guère dans la diligence et on ne lit pas volontiers dans l’automobile. Minuté avec précision, scandé par le rythme des roues et des stations, enfermant le voyageur dans la coque protectrice du compartiment, le déplacement en chemin de fer est par excellence adapté au parcours d’un récit lui-même programmé. Jacques Dubois, Le Roman policier et la modernité, p. 27. • New time & space parameters

4. Crime genre and photography… Beyond the evidential use of photography… • Economic level: multiplication of same images/narrative patterns • Sociological level: divides between private/public spheres: • La focalisation de la fiction sur la vie intime, voire secrète, des personnages est consubstantielle à l’énigme. Mode d’appropriation qu’ignorait le roman antérieur. Car fondamentalement la connivence entre détective (romancier) et lecteur est regard indiscret sur la vie des autres, curiosité trouble envers ce que fait le voisin. Somme toute, c’est un genre entier qui fait de l’indiscrétion et du commérage son principe narratif, son parti pris de méthode. Jacques Dubois, Le Roman policier et la modernité, p. 28. • Producers and audiences

5. Crime genre and photography… • ‘viséeattestatrice’: Tous deux sont animés, dans leur principe, par la préoccupation de fixer la trace de ce qui a été et ne sera plus. La photographie est empreinte, le detectivenovel, pratique l’empreinte. Et le procès d’identification est tributaire de ces empreintes, effets latéraux et circonstanciels qui permettent de remonter à des facteurs plus stables et plus lourds de sens. Ibid., pp. 29-30.

6. Traces et empreintes: Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) identification and anthropometry • The “portrait parlé” (“spoken portrait”) is an identification technique invented by Alphonse Bertillon in the early stages of development of his anthropometric measurements system. This method, compiled in 1893, was meant to supplement measurements and better ascertain the identity of a given person. Each section of the body and face was designated by a corresponding sign and transcribed in succession, the end result being an individual descriptive card (fiche signalétique) that could be further condensed into a notice.

7. Mystery resolution: a metonymic process • Clues = metonymies; fragments vs. sequence • Renaissance and ‘Galileian paradigm’ (quantitative) vs. ‘Morellian method’ (qualitative - late 19th C) – See Freud on Morelli: Long before I had the opportunity of hearing about psycho-analysis, I learnt that [Morelli] had caused a revolution in the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty […]. He achieved this by insisting that attention should be diverted from the original impression and main features of a picture and he laid stress on the significance of minor details, on the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of aureoles and such considered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet that every artist executes in his own characteristic way […]. It seems to me that this method of enquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things, from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observation. Quoted by Ginzburg in Myths, Emblems, Clues, p. 99.

8. The Morellian method… • Morelli’s book is different from those of any writer on art; they are sprinkled with illustrations of fingers and ears, careful records of the characteristic trifles by which an artist gives himself away, as a criminal might be spotted by a fingerprint […] any art gallery studied by Morelli begins to resemble a rogue’s gallery. Quoted by Carlo Ginsburg, in Myths, Emblems, clues, p. 97.

9. The Morellian method… • As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive, and differs from all other ones. In last year’s Anthropological Journal you will find two short monographs from my pen upon the subject. I had, therefore, examined the ears in the box with the eyes of an expert, and had carefully noted their anatomical peculiarities. Quoted by Carlo Ginzburg, in Myths, Emblems, clues, p. 98.

10. Medicine… hunting… fiction • Quantitative & qualitative: diagnostic = metonymic reconstruction [‘evidential’, ‘conjectural’ – ‘presumptive paradigm’ – causes inferred from their effects • Origin of fiction in hunting practices (venatic art): ‘the hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events’ (103). • Serendipity (Horace Walpole)