The Poetics of Pastiche in Eco's Postmodern Detective Novel

Abstract

While the traditional boulevard novel of Eugène Sue wants to entertain and sell, Umberto Eco's boulevard novel wants to entertain and educate the contemporary reader in Italian history and in a form of modern semiotic theory. However, Eco's educational mission does not transform the low genre of the boulevard novel but remains bound by its limitations of “rhetoric and ideology.” Eco's reader is left with a representation of history as pastiche and a populist misconception about the potential of semiotics to relativise the perception of reality. Both history and semiotics are ultimately used by Eco not as heuristic devices but as instruments of seduction directed at a modern middle-class reading public with intellectual aspirations.

Notes

NOTES

I would like to acknowledge Rhonda Khatab's helpful discussion on the points relating to footnotes 26 and 30.

1. The boulevard genre is genealogically related to the picaresque novel. The boulevard and the picaresque genre deal with the “low life” of the “new” eighteenth-century “city” and touch on pornographic or transgressive subject matter. The picaresque novel is itself a bifurcation of the eighteenth-century adventure novel. The gothic novel derived its names from its settings: Gothic castles with labyrinths of subterranean corridors, which became a source for its uncanny or horror plots. Compare, for instance, Castle of Otranto (1766), by Horace Walpole, or Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin. The historical connection between the adventure novel, the gothic novel and the detective novel is alluded to in brief in Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (city: Viking, 1985), 28–29.

2. Symons notes that Conan Doyle was “a super-typical Victorian, a bluff imperialist” and that his first two Holmes books were neither successful nor good literature. In 1886, when considering publication of A Study in Scarlet, the publisher Ward Lock, told Doyle that it would have to wait as the “market was flooded with cheap fiction” (Bloody Murder, 64). Stefano Tani also connects the detective novel with the rise of capitalism, in that, according to him, the “private detective became the model of middle-class enterprise.” Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), xii.

3. In his seminal study of the tradition of “folk culture” in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, entitled Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), originally published in Russian as Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i renessansa (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1965), Mikhail Bakhtin defines “popular culture” in very specific terms. For Bakhtin, “popular culture” is synonymous with a transgressive, parodic and carnivalesque relation to “official” culture grounded in state or church dogma. “Popular culture” does not necessarily mean something “produced” by the populace, the “common throng,” but it does mean the use of the popular discourse: the folk vernacular, folk sayings, folk wisdom, folk expressions such as swear words, and everything that qualifies as a spontaneous outpouring of an “authentic” popular language.

4. According to Tani, the modern detective novel, which for him begins with Edgar Allan Poe, is motivated by “a deep personal need for order.” Tani also establishes the connection between the rationality of the Enlightenment, with its focus on inductive reasoning, and the rise of the detective novel (The Doomed Detective, 2).

5. Compare the evaluation of Conan Doyle's detective stories as “casual” in “construction” by virtue of the introduction of contradictory material “within the canon” (Symons, Bloody Murder, 71).

6. At the same time, the boulevard genre continues to influence High Literature through its “heterogeneous” form (or formlessness) and its poetics of entertainment. Thus Dostoevsky incorporates the idea of “interesting reading” (zanimatel’nost’) in the poetics of his novel, while adapting its adventure (or detective) novel structure to the needs of High bourgeois culture and its process of historical and aesthetic self-examination. Dostoevsky's novels of High culture, all of which centre around a murder plot and thus qualify on some level as detective novels, are not read (or understood) by the St Petersburg maids and cooks (the “people” or the “masses”), who are reading Eugène Sue in Russian translation, along with “low” Russian writers of the genre. Dostoevsky also reads Sue, not for entertainment, but in order to appropriate Sue's “low” genre for his “Realist” poetics and the portrayal of the modernizing Russian society of the mid-nineteenth century. This type of reception history testifies to the versatility of the detective novel as a genre in its capacity to adapt to various social and cultural discourses.

7. I share Theodor Adorno's orientation in his critique of the “culture industry” when I elaborate my model of “popular culture” as distinct from modern “mass culture” in the above-defined sense of “cheap publications” that require what I call effortless consumption. Popular culture understood as an integral part of the European literary canon coincides with the rise of the avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century and is grounded in a “democratic” phenomenological aesthetics (of which Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque genres [see note 4 above] are a precursor) and the poetics of European Modernism. See Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “Popular Culture versus Mass Culture: Tolstoy's What is art? as a Test for the Russian Detektiv,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 29.3 (2002): 291–311.

8. Reason and inductive thinking are noted by many writers on the detective novel to be salient characterological features of the chief detectives. See Jochen Vogt, ed., Der Kriminalroman: Poetik, Theorie, Geschichte (München: Fink, 1998).

9. The mythological dimension of the detective hero has been noted eloquently by Umberto Eco in relation to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. See Umberto Eco, “Die Erzählstrukturen bei Ian Fleming,” in Vogt, Der Kriminalroman, 197; and Umberto Eco, “Narrative Structures in Ian Fleming,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 144–72; subsequent references to The Role of the Reader are cited in the text.

10. Rabelais's carnivalesque novel, The Life of Gargantua, is supposed to be an edited version of an authentic chronicle–a detail that is unverifiable according to Henry Morley. The same device is adopted by Eco in his medieval “chronicle” which thus connects Eco's postmodern novel to the very source of modern European fiction.

11. Eco has also studied the phenomenon of kitsch in some detail in “La struttura del cattivo gusto,” in Apocalittici e Integrati (Milan: Bompiani, 1964).

12. Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984); subsequent references to The Name of the Rose cited in the text.

13. The expression “jouissance of the text” was first made popular as a critical term by Roland Barthes in his Le plaisir du text (New York, 1975). It refers to the experience of a text as something close to orgasm or abandon, implying both the “death of the author” who “dies” in the process of “writing” and the petit mort of the reader, whose ego is “lost” in the pleasure of reading. Although Barthes contends that the “pleasure of the text” always remains “a pleasure of consumption,” he also claims that “the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia,” which has the effect of creating a space of autonomy for the reader, formulated by Barthes as “that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term).” Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1982), 164. Thus Barthes's semiotics of the text, consistent with Bakhtin's translinguistics, points to the dialogic nature of texts and the space of interpretation built into their structure which allows for the “circulation” (or dialogic relation) of languages (discourses) in place of a “linear” reading (like the one mandated by Eco's poetics of pastiche).

14. Umberto Eco speaks of “collage” as a structural and stylistic feature of Ian Fleming's detective genre. See Eco, “Die Erzählstrukturen bei Ian Fleming,” in Vogt, Der Kriminalroman, 203; and Eco, The Role of the Reader, 168 ff.  Frederic Jameson recognises the stylistics of camp as a major structural component of Raymond Chandler's postmodern detective novels. Jameson connects the camp stylistics with a kind of “nostalgia,” which comes to expression in an art form which does not know “direct experience.” Instead, this “nostalgic” art form, exemplified by pop art and the detective novel among other genres, is determined “by ideological artefacts.” Frederic Jameson, “Űber Raymond Chandler,” in Vogt, Der Kriminalroman, 387; my translation.

15. The term dialogicity belongs to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of discourse which is exemplified, in his analysis, by the novels of Dostoevsky. The dialogic structure of the novel implies not only that each quoted word is in a dialogic relation with other words, that is, that each word resonates with multiple contexts or the “semantic position” of an “other”; it also implies that the hierarchy of utterances or “voices” in the novel is abolished in favour of many independent “voices” or levels of meaning coming together within the novel to construct a “meaning.” Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, intro. Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 184–85. On the “embedded” structure of the narrative text of the novel, see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans.Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 253.

16. By using the term supplement, I allude to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the process of (deconstructive) interpretation as set out in Jacques Derrida, “… That Dangerous Supplement …,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141–64. Here, a text is defined as “production” or “the system of a writing and of a reading,” “ordered around its own blind spot.” Thus the notion of text in poststructural critical theory implies a process which involves reader reception.

17. Although Bakhtin speaks of “the author” when analysing the structure of the polyphonic novel, he is emphatic about the categorical separation of the world outside the text from the world inside. Compare Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 253 and 48–49. For an exposition of the Structuralist theory of narrative and in particular the model of narrative extrapolated from Bakhtin's dialogicity, compare Wolf Schmid, Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973). For a summary and adaptation of Schmid's Bakhtinian model of the narrative text, see Slobodanka Vladiv, Narrative Situation in Dostoevsky's Besy: A Structural Analysis (Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 1979), 17–36.

18. C. S. Peirce is invoked by Eco in The Role of the Reader as the authority on whose teaching of the sign Eco bases his own understanding of signs. However, Eco's interpretation of Peirce's Pragmatism is idiosyncratic and requires a detailed critique to be properly evaluated. Similarly, Eco's conception of an “open” versus a “closed” text is contrary to the hermeneutic understanding of a text as always interpretable. Eco's “open” and “closed” text also does not resonate with Bakhtin's concepts of “dialogic” and “monologic” discourse. A detailed critique is needed to evaluate Eco's text theory in the context of contemporary narratology, but such a critique of Eco is beyond the scope of this essay.

19. Bakhtin claims as much in The Dialogic Imagination, 48–49.

20. My study of the postmodern Russian detective novel has led to a similar finding, namely, that it is meant to be consumed, not interpreted (“Popular Culture versus Mass Culture,” 291–311).

21. I distinguish here between popular culture (as defined by Bakhtin) and mass culture. I also disagree with Jean Baudrillard's analytic of pop culture which relies on an uninterpretable banal. The banal is an important component of postmodern poetics, for example, in the novels of Danilo Kiš. On this, see Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover, “The Occult and the Profane in Kiš's Post-Holocaust Poetics,” in Entgrenzte Repräsentation/gebrochene Realitäten. Danilo Kiš im Spannungsfeld von Ethik, Literature und Politik, ed. Peter Rehder (München: Verlag Sagner, 2001), 127–56. The banal is the pop artist's guarantee of freedom in that it allows him to be, as Baudrillard correctly finds, “at the heart of nowhere.” This is not, however, in order to “liberate us from art and its critical utopia,” as Baudrillard would have it. This is in order to free the artist from all ideological positions through a “phenomenological reduction” of all phenomena to that of the unrepresentable. Note the word REDUCED, printed in large letters along the foyer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which signals this “subtraction” of art from ideology. Jeff Koone's kitsch art of the 1980s functions in precisely this way. The trend was started by Andy Warhol with pop art in the 1960s. In Russia, where the separation of art from ideology was more poignantly noticed, the equivalent movement was Conceptualism, one of whose progenitors was Ilya Kabakov in the 1980s (on the eve of perestroika). There the banal is an anti-metaphor for the unrepresentable real, which acts as a corrective to the ideologically posited “reality” of “socialist realism” and “scientific communism.” Baudrillard reinterprets the function of the banal in postmodern pop art, wrongly, as images that are “products of the absence of any interpretative pretension on the part of the subject.” The phenomenological subject can never relinquish his interpretive “pretension.” This would amount to a total negation of the phenomenological experience of perception constituted by the subject's point of view. Without a subjective point of view, there would be no experience, and without experience the world of the subject (and hence of literature) would not exist. See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), 76.

22. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 253, 262–63. For a dialogic model of the narrative structure of Dostoevsky's prose, see Schmid, Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs, and Vladiv, Narrative Principles in Dostoevsky's Besy, 23–36.

23. The concept of “pragmatics” assumes an idiosyncratic meaning in Eco's The Role of the Reader. Despite framing his theory of reception of signs in Peirce's pragmatism, Eco's translation of Peirce's theory of the sign into his own reception theory assumes a materialist and positivist form. Thus, while Peirce's sign translates into “action,” and “meaning” becomes a matter of the consequence or outcome of an “act” (of thought), Eco's pragmatics is concerned with the sociology of reception or how a certain concrete reading public can become active recipients of a certain type of text message.

24. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 4, where Eco analyses Baudelaire's intertextual “strategy” in Les Chats, “to understand the role of the reader in the poetic strategy of that sonnet,” which according to Eco consists of Baudelaire “forecasting” and “activating” a reader with an “intertextual competence,” who would “cooperate” with the text. Such a pragmatic approach to the structure of the poetic text makes no allowance for the creative participation of the unconscious which sublates the category of intentionality in the production of the artistic text. To investigate a text from the point of view of what the author intended is contrary to Structuralist and hermeneutic theory. See Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, a student of Gadamer (who was a student of Heidegger), who contends that a work of art can never be interpreted definitively. This is because one interprets from the signs or structural data, in “reverse genesis” as it were. The number of signs in a work of art is potentially infinite, but is held in check by the finite structure of language, which allows for a hermeneutic “reconstruction “of the “idea” (as opposed to the “concrete”) genesis of the work. See also Vladiv, Narrative Principles in Dostoevsky's Besy, 21, note 1; and Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Versuch über Dostoevskijs ‘Jüngling’: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Romans (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1965), 19.

25. See Eco, Postscript, 50, where Eco's model reader is the “empirical reader” (our Concrete Reader in the Structuralist model).

26. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 7.

27. Derrida's theory of texts and supplements is commonly called “grammatology,” while “translinguistics” is Bakhtin's collective term for his methodology of interpretation of dialogic or polyphonic texts.

28. Eco admits, almost triumphantly, that the structure of his detective novel, with its ingénu narrator, was better received by the “unsophisticated readers” than the “cultivated readers” (Postscript, 34).

29. “Bearing the device” to reveal the structure of literary texts was first theorised by the Russian Formalists. See Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 94–95.

30. Eco, Postscript, 53.

31. Eco admits as much in his Postscript, where he says that “writing means constructing, through the text, one's own model reader,” who may be one “standing there, money in hand, just outside the door.” By comparing this ideal reader of mass consumer culture with one that Joyce may have “imagined” as an ideal reader, “affected by an ideal insomnia,” Eco hopes to universalise his assumption about the ideal reader being a construct of the concrete author in both High literature and consumer culture. He remains unaware of the difference in his theoretical writing, while in his creative writing he produces mass culture texts, not novels à la James Joyce.

32. See Lane Cooper, ed., Aristotelian Theory of Comedy: With an Adaptation of the Poetics, and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus (Kraus Reprint, 1969). This is a study of a manuscript, discovered by the British scholar, Lane Cooper, and attributed to Aristotle. It is the only extant portion of Aristotle's Poetics that offers a full (though succinct) model of Greek Comedy.

33. To disorient the reader is Eco's stated aim (Postscript, 3).

34. The “authorised” method of configuring history in postmodernism is the method Michel Foucault called “genealogy,” in tribute to Friedrich Nietzsche's deconstruction of the linear narrative of the history of Western morality. A genealogical approach to any narrative involves its contextualisation in all manner of contiguous texts, from a perspective in the present. A genealogy would mean, according to Foucault, a deconstruction or revaluation of historical narratives from a contemporary point of view. A genealogy treats history as text and brings all texts into a synchronic field—the present of the historian—in order to examine them as documents of their times. The act of re-examination or revaluation of the historical documents amounts to a hermeneutic procedure of interpretation of texts.

35. Eco translates the Formalist term fabula into “story” and sujet into “plot” and treats both as linear progressions. Sujet, in the understanding of the Russian Formalists, is the manner in which the fabula is organised in non-linear fashion. I am staying true to the original Formalists’ dichotomy of fabula and sujet.

36. Read on 18 May 2004, at http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Marsiliu.html

37. Jean Baudrillard defines kitsch in The Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968–1983, trans. and ed. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1990), 74–76.

38. Compare the following historical judgement about John XXII: “John XXII 1244–1334, pope (1316–34), a Frenchman (b. Cahors) named Jacques DuEse; successor of Clement V. Formerly, he was often called John XXI. He reigned at Avignon. John was celebrated as a canon lawyer under Boniface VIII, whom he supported. After the death of Clement there was a period of more than two years before the conclave could agree. Before John's election a contest had begun for the title of Holy Roman Emperor between Louis IV of Bavaria and his rival, Frederick of Austria. John was neutral at first; then in 1323, when Louis had won and became Holy Roman emperor, pope and emperor began a serious quarrel. This was partly provoked by John's extreme claims of authority over the empire and partly by Louis' support of the spiritual Franciscans, whom John XXII condemned for their insistence on evangelical poverty. Louis was assisted by Marsilius of Padua, who in 1324 published his exposition of his theories Defensor pacis, and later by William of Ockham. The emperor invaded Italy and set up (1328) as an antipope Pietro Rainalducci (as Nicholas V). The project was a fiasco, but Louis silenced the papal claims. In John's last years he advanced a theory concerning the vision of God in heaven or the beatific vision; the novelty he proposed (that this vision will begin only after the Last Judgment) was widely denied and scorned by theologians, and John subsequently modified it. He was an excellent administrator and did much efficient reorganizing. He was succeeded by Benedict XII.” Read on 18 May 2004, at www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-John22.html

39. “‘America has arrived here! Such prosperity! Almost everyone has a job,’” the words of an 80-year-old Sicilian fisherman, quoted in David Wiley, Italians. Photographs by Fulvio Roiter (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1984), 12. Wiley's journalistic account points in particular to the rise of small businesses and manufacture, such as cloth and clothing, as the basis of this new Italian prosperity.

40. See, for example, Eco's assertion: “In order to be defined, the object must be related back to the total series of which, by virtue of being one possible apparition, it is a member. In this way the traditional dualism between being and appearance is replaced by a straight polarity of finite and infinite, which locates the infinite at the very core of the finite. This sort of ‘openness’ is at the heart of every act of perception” (The Role of the Reader, 60).

41. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, generally known as The Blue and the Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 16–18; and Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 66–67.

42. Eco, The Name of the Rose, 28.

43. See, for instance, Jacques Lacan's assertion that language always expresses something that has not been intended by the speaker of the utterance: “What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something other than what it says.” Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), 155.

44. On the concept of abyss or en abyme (in French: en abîme), implying the infinite structuration of textuality (a taste of which is given in the layered or embedded model of the structure of a literary text discussed earlier), see Jacques Derrida, “That Dangerous Supplement,” 163.

45. See the analysis of the influence of the Catholic Church on Italian society up to and including the 1980s in John Haycraft, Italian Labyrinth: Italy in the 1980s (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 257. In 1974, a referendum had to be held on the divorce law, which was still in the Church's jurisdiction.

46. On the “real” represented as the uncanny in the postmodern novel proper, see Vladiv-Glover, “The Occult and the Profane in Danilo Kiš's Encyclopaedia of the Dead,” in Entgrenzte Repräsentation/gebrochene Realitäten, 127–56. The “real” is defined by Lacan as the unrepresentable, not as “reality.”

47. Derrida, “That Dangerous Supplement,” 163.

48. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 140.