Finitude and the Limits of Reason in Classical Detective Fiction

In his treatise entitled ‘Le Roman policier’ (1925), Siegfried Kracauer does not only criticise the ideology of crime fiction, i.e. the way it reflects the economic infrastructures in which it is embedded as a cultural form, he also denounces its demands for truth as purely immanent. Grounding his critique on Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist theory of the three spheres (aesthetic, religious, ethical), Kracauer shows that the highest sphere, called religious by Kierkergaard, that of mystery, has been abandoned by modern man, no longer the complete, authentic, existential creature who is poised in a tension towards the metaphysical. High aspirations are still dormant, but they are translated so as to fit the inferior sphere; they appear in a distorted form, conveyed by ‘inadequate material’ (un matériau inadéquat), that of detective fiction (Kracauer, 2001, p. 37). To discuss the aesthetic configuration of detective fiction, Kracauer introduces his own ‘legal’ sphere, the immanently human, as distinct from the sphere of grace, which holds human law to be purely relative, ‘the repartition of functions between them being the exact sociological expression of the metaphysical position of men’ (p. 42)5. He also ushers in the ‘low’ sphere of evil to claim that when the high sphere is depleted, mystery is related to the dark powers of inferior regions. If the caste of priests does not fulfil its duty of mediation, mystery runs the risk of being re-invested by their heretic counterparts, those who challenge human law: criminals and outcasts. In short, mystery is displaced downwards. In a context of de-realisation and removal of mystery, detective fiction acts as the reminder, albeit in a debased medium, of a lost metaphysical dimension. By caricaturing the unidimensional, nightmarish dryness brought about by the rule of ratio, detective fiction holds up a distorting mirror to modern alienation. Its metaphysical potential lies counter-intuitively in its capacity for abstract modelling: ‘Without being a work of art, detective fiction presents to de-realised society its own face, in a purer form that it could have seen it otherwise’ (p. 52)6.

By outwardly celebrating the prowess of ratiocination, detective fiction, through the stylisation it accomplishes, inadvertently betrays its hidden meaning: the exposure of meaninglessness. But its revealing power does not stop there. The form also points to authenticity by gesturing towards an allegorical version of itself:

Just as the detective reveals the secret buried between people, the detective novel discloses, in the aesthetic medium, the secret of the de-realized society and its substanceless marionettes. Its composition transforms life incapable of apprehending itself into an interpretable copy of authentic reality. [Kracauer, 2001, p. 53]7

Detective fiction stages the claims of reason to rule over the world; a world that conveniently fits its categories. It is emphatically the form of finitude. Poe famously pointed to his own sleight of hand to conceal tautology:

These tales of ratiocination owe their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious – but people think them more ingenious than they are – on account of their method and air of method. In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.[Poe, 1846, n. p.]

As if to counter his creator in one of his erudite musings, Dupin suggests in ‘The Purloined Letter’ that physics and metaphysics are connected by a system of correspondences revealed by metaphor:

‘The material world,’ continued Dupin, ‘abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description’. [Poe, 2012, p. 135]

Dupin goes on to explain that the law of vis inertiae applies both to the material and the immaterial; thoughts of a wide scope, like massive bodies, are harder to move than their more limited counterparts. This preamble allows for the famous demonstration that highly visible words on a map will not be perceived if excessive attention is devoted to reading its small print. Analogously, problems, enigmas, mysteries must be met by an adequate quantity of thought – not too little, not too much. In a manner similar to Pascal’s discussion of the opinions of common people, the half-clever and the clever as boiling down to a series of alternatives (the clever one being closer to the common man than to the half-clever ones who think they know better), Dupin then resorts to the game of even and odd as an analogy to the detective’s anticipating his opponent’s move. Guesswork is reduced to a binary choice, and increasing complexity amounts to increasing simplicity. Beyond the immediate utility of the analogy as playful demonstration, the computer logic exhibited by the successive demonstrations of ratiocination in ‘The Purloined Letter’ (the map, the schoolboy’s game, the letter) might well be read as Poe’s parodic treatment of a reductionist refusal of metaphysics.

By solipsistically denying all transcendence to the power of reason, by flattening out paradox and contradiction, detective fiction allows for the return of the repressed: murder as mystery, an emissary of the unfathomable. Even Sherlock Holmes has fleeting metaphysical moments. ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ (1893), admittedly a simple case, features gruesome evidence: a pair of dried-up human ears from two different people sent to a harmless spinster. This outrageously incongruous motif doubles up as an emblem pointing to absence of motivation8. If the murders are duly solved by the detective as crimes of passion, sending the desiccated organs as a gesture of revenge opens up several inroads contributing to an overall sense of senselessness, or even nihilism. Sent to the wrong address, the package was meant for the malevolent woman responsible for the onslaught, the sister of both one of the victims and the spinster who received the package. Out of spite, this third woman had insidiously talked her married sister into betraying her husband, the killer of the illegitimate couple. The culprit is in fact her third victim. If Holmes succeeds in rationalising the chain of causality, a series of deductions and inductions that is vindicated by the confession letter of the culprit, he falls short of bringing under control the disturbing dimension of gratuitous evil that animates the human agents. After providing his usual grand finale explaining all of the above, Holmes embarks on an uncharacteristic philosophical reflection:

‘What is the meaning of it, Watson?’ said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. ‘What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever’. [Conan Doyle, 1997, p. 319]

The solution has opened up an abyss. Mere deciphering has given way to engagement with the world. The detective is no longer an a posteriori interpreter of a finite system of signs but he becomes an active participant in a mystery exceeding mere enigma:

Some writers have managed to avoid the semiotic trap while remaining within the vaguely defined borders of the detective novel, by creating detective-protagonists who understand their job as something more than puzzle-solving. [Stowe, 1983, p. 375]

The work of reason in its metaphysical use (and not scientific use) consists in an attempt at comprehending a meaningful totality beyond mere criminal motives. The quest for meaning involves, among other things, the understanding of how the world relates to man, and to the self. In hard-boiled fiction, this widening out of the speculative quest is expressed by the motif of conspiracy that simultaneously spreads out and closes in. The detective discovers the ever larger rhizomic network of guilt that connects pillars of respectability to the mob, for instance, but he also enacts Oedipean anagnorisis by finding himself enmeshed in it: ‘Me, I was part of the nastiness now’ is the Marlovian conclusion of The Big Sleep (Chandler, 2018, p. 220). Intelligibility comes at the cost of participation and vulnerability. Thus, the absence of transcendence brought about by abstraction, as diagnosed by Kracauer for whodunits, turns into the desperate embracing of a sort of absolute immanence in hard-boiled and noir.

Gnostic Mechanics: Contingency in The Big Sleep

Participation acknowledges the detective’s physical, almost visceral, engagement with his environment. In ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950), Raymond Chandler does express the hard-boiled revolution in spatial terms: ‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley’ (1983, p. 188). The hard-boiled detective is embedded in the metropolis, his investigation is ‘an experience of space’ (Jameson, 2016, p. 29) because it addresses the metaphysical dimension of hard-boiled fiction and not its socio-economic underpinnings. This essay will not pursue the Marxist implications for the noir form of what Jameson calls ‘cognitive mapping’ elsewhere (see Jameson, 1984), i.e. the attempt to locate the subject in the global capitalist conspiracy.

In ‘The Philosophy of Crime Novels’ (‘Philosophie de la Série noire’, 1966), Gilles Deleuze highlights trial and error as a way not only to experience the world existentially – as a series of blunders and lapses in logic and causality – but also to come to the gradual awareness that reality is a fabrication, in which the detective and the police’s inquiry only counts as ‘compensation for [the criminal’s] errors’ to maintain the status quo: ‘These compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the height of its power of falsehood’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 83). Although meant in a sociopolitical context, the reference to the ‘power of falsehood’ has gnostic resonances. Drawing on this Deleuzian interpretation, one could re-assess the line: ‘me, I was part of the nastiness now’ as emphasizing ‘the nastiness’ itself and not only the detective’s now being ‘part of [it]’ (p. 83).

The machinery of power set up by the very rich in Chandlertown should not be read in economic, political or social terms only. The network of guilt point to what Chandler called ‘a world gone wrong’ whose dimension far exceeds the human scale (1983, p. 9)9, as is intimated by The Big Sleep’s constant references to unnatural weather and its ‘mechanistic, post Einsteinian’ metaphors (Marling, 1998, p. 209). The Chandlerian rhetoric reverts the direction of Dupin’s remark quoted above about the analogy between the material and the immaterial. In The Big Sleep, it is the ‘immaterial’ that is reduced through ‘very strict analogies to the material’ (Chandler, 2018, p. 209). Hence the absurdist feel of Chandlerian metaphors, pointing to gnostic metaphysics.

Human beings seem to have been engineered, androids whose various parts hardly hold together: when he first meets Carmen, Marlowe remarks that she was ‘delicately put together, but she looked durable’ (Chandler, 2018, p. 10); two pages later, he himself has to ‘push [his] lower jaw up off [his] chest’ (p. 12); General Sternwood, Carmen’s father, is a very old man whose neck ‘is afraid of the weight of his head’ (p. 15) and the contrived smile of a porn bookstore attendant is ‘hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped’ (p. 28); on another occasion, the same woman will ‘put together [her face] again slowly, as if lifting a great weight’ (p. 55). The demiurge who forged them is definitely malevolent, and harnesses natural elements to counter their feeble efforts to control their own lives: ‘a pool of water formed on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in’ (p. 35), Marlowe notes half-humorously as he is keeping watch on a suspect; rejecting the particle at the end of the sentence emphasises a form of pointedness, a sense of devious purpose which mocks human agency. Everything is deliberate, if hard to grasp.

The contradiction of randomness is expressed in dice: the result of throwing the dice is totally erratic, evidence of absolute contingency; but a highly unlikely series of the same result, or a result that meets the player’s desire in the nick of time points to ‘luck’, a first step towards a form of necessity. The Big Sleep features a highly dramatic scene involving Vivian Sternwood, Carmen’s sister, playing roulette, which is generally interpreted as part of the isotopy of decadence, the exposure of the restlessness of spoilt plutocrats, and this dimension is certainly present when Marlowe overhears the conversation of two men watching Vivian win:

‘Boy, I never saw such a run,’ [one of them] said in a jittery voice. ‘Eight wins and two stand-offs in a row on that red. That’s roulette, boy, that’s roulette.’
‘It gives me the itch,’ the other one said. ‘She’s betting a grand at a crack. She can’t lose.’ They put their beaks in their drinks, gurgled swiftly and went back. [Chandler, 2018, p. 135]

As it happens, Vivian forces the casino owner to cover her next bet and she wins one more time, a huge sum. Marlowe tails her walking into the fog outside the casino and rescues her when she is robbed by a man wearing a mask. Chance had been neutralised by a form of necessity when it turns out that Vivian has a debt towards the mobster who owns the casino, so that she does not really object when he retrieves her win. She was not supposed to keep the money in the first place, and her acceptance of the more or less staged mugging is duly understood by Marlowe as a clue pointing to her dependency towards the mob. This will help him figure out a pattern of complicity. The narrative significance of the scene is thus combined to its value as social or moral denunciation. But a more important level of meaning can be derived from the fact that roulette is just one among many of the manifestations of chance that are foregrounded by the novel.

For Marlowe does not break the case. Instead, his progress relies on a series of almost melodramatic coincidences. Marlowe reaches for a knocker, and ‘at that instant, as if somebody had been waiting for the cue, three shots boomed into the house’ (Chandler, 2018, p. 37); when he returns to the crime scene, he stumbles upon Carmen and they are interrupted in turn: ‘she had her hand on the knob when we both heard a car coming’ (p. 69); enters Eddie Mars, the gangster and casino owner previously referred to. His wife has supposedly eloped with Vivian’s husband, who has in fact been murdered by Carmen; the phoney elopement is the cover up he has instigated with Vivian to protect Carmen. Mars is coincidentally the landlord of the house where the shooting took place, whose tenant, who blackmailed the Sternwood family for other reasons, has been killed. It is a highly likely ‘lucky break’ (p. 163), given the Los Angeles traffic, that reveals the fact that Mrs Mars has not left the city with her lover: ‘Joe and I were riding Foothill Boulevard Sunday before last. It was late and the lights coming up and the usual mess of cars. We passed a brown coupé and I saw the girl who was driving it’ (p. 175). Mona Mars is thus recognised and tailed by another team of blackmailers. No wonder then if Marlowe makes an uncharacteristic statement for a detective: ‘fate stage-managed the whole thing’ (p. 177) when, following his witness’s directions to locate Mrs Mars, he punctures a tyre right next to the garage at the outskirts of a town aptly named Realito where she is holed up as a willing captive. At that point chance assumes its other face, uncanny necessity.

At first sight, the two notions are antonymous. Randomness, the fact that something could have been otherwise, or not be at all, is the opposite of necessity, the fact that it could not have been otherwise. As seen above, though, and as theorised by the contemporary branch of philosophy called ‘speculative realism’, this apparent opposition is subsumed in the notion that chance is the foundational absolute of reality: ‘Contingency or coincidence, chance is thus infinite precisely in that it contains both what exposes it in its dreary evidence and what denies it through the luminous appearance of Meaning’ (Meillassoux, 2011, p. 36; my translation).10

Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la finitude (2006) postulates negatively that the absolute is but ‘the absolute impossibility of a necessary being’ (p. 82; my translation)11. The claim that absolute randomness – including the denial of the laws of physics – rules the world makes it possible to go beyond what speculative realism calls ‘correlationism’, i.e. Kant’s notion that the world that appears to the subject is not the world as it is, and only a certain amount of reality is knowable, thanks to the organising power of our mental faculties. Speculative realism swings around Kant’s Copernican revolution that made reason metaphysically incompetent12. For speculative realism, randomness is the point of entry to objects as they are in themselves13: they exist independently of our perception of them, and independently of any causality.

To put things a bit summarily, if everything can and does make sense in the whodunit, purely oriented towards human reason, in hard-boiled novels, such anthropomorphic complacency has worn thin. Evidence of it is to be found in the economy of information: where in Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie everything is either a clue or a red herring, the Chandlerian text abounds in insignificant details. Fredric Jameson has addressed Chandler’s vignettes of secondary or even irrelevant characters or spaces as providing ‘fragmentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature’ (1983, p. 124). The blind spot of ideology can be punctured by a form of oblique, from the corner of one’s eye, perception. But those vignettes can also be read as instances of reality effect: ‘Is everything in narrative significant, and if not, if insignificant stretches subsist in the narrative syntagm, what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignificance?’ (Barthes, 1989, p. 143). Barthes daringly answers: ‘none’. These ‘irreducible residues’ (p. 146) serve no purpose other than sitting there. They are thus particularly scandalous in detective fiction.

Seen from a philosophical perspective, however, reality effect provides the adequate rendering of ‘unreason’; it accounts for the obstinate presence of things (or events) in themselves, unfathomable even if they are familiar. A ‘case of false teeth hung on [a] mustard-coloured wall like a fuse box in a screen porch’ (Chandler, 2018, p. 166), next to an old spittoon in a lobby, downtown Los Angeles, has no diegetic role. We can easily infer that it used to signal a dentist’s practice14, but it does not exhaust its grotesqueness. In Chandler’s Gnostic, emphatically meaningless world, material reality refuses to signify anything but wrongness. Climbing the stairs of the decrepit building, on his way to the office where he was to meet an informant, Marlowe hears through a glass transom a deadly voice addressing the latter right before he is killed gratuitously with poison: ‘[The voice] had a heavy purr, like a small dynamo behind a brick wall’ (p. 167). Marlowe can only see ‘a shadow melt[ing] from behind the pebble glass’ of the door behind which the murder is committed (p. 167). In Chandler’s allegory of the cave, the detective is not a prisoner who escapes illusion, to catch a glimpse at the light of intelligible reality; instead, he descends deliberately into the darkness of ‘Realito’: ‘I was where I wanted to be’ (p. 178). In this material world threatened with constant entropy, where human agents are puppets hastily put together (one man has a glass eye, a woman wears a silver wig to cover her bald head, cigarettes are glued to gangsters’ mouths ‘[hanging] to the corner of it as if by some magic, as if it had grown there’ (p. 159)), who emit sounds like a dynamo or like ‘rats behind the wainscoting in an old house’ (p. 151), the only metaphysical insight that can be gained is through via negativa. Even as the murder is elucidated, or rather, re-enacted, when Carmen tries to kill Marlowe in the same place, the same way and for the same motive she killed her brother-in-law15, Marlowe’s quest remains unfinished business in a world somehow out of joint.

In The Big Sleep, chance mocks the deductive powers of the detective up against cosmic forces; it also exposes its true nature as devious necessity. The interplay between contingency and necessity is also addressed in The Maltese Falcon via a puzzling discussion of probability.

Randomness and probability: Peirce’s tychism in The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon features an embedded anecdote known as ‘the Flitcraft parable’ by mystery aficionados. In chapter 7, Sam Spade abruptly spins an apparently irrelevant yarn about a former case, a missing person investigation, to an indifferent audience, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, not yet the suspect for us, readers. The anecdote is yet another gratuitous development within the past case, a twice-removed inserted narrative, as the missing person, a man named Flitcraft, explained to the detective what caused his disappearance:

Here’s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up – just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger – well, affectionately – when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. [Hammett, 1992, p. 63]

Following this accident and his dark epiphany, Flitcraft had left his family. But the story does not end here: after he had drifted back to the Northwest and relocated in Spokane, Flitcraft, now Charles Pierce, had simply reproduced his former life. He had married a wife similar to Mrs Flitcraft and resumed his former lifestyle; in Nietzschean terms, ‘existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: “the eternal recurrence”’ (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 35). Spade presents the story as an enigmatic philosophical tale whose bearing on the present case is purely analogical. He tells Brigid: ‘I got it all right […] but Mrs Flitcraft never did’ (Hammett, 1992, p. 63). The reason for this perplexity is the failure to notice Mr Flitcraft’s alias, ‘Charles Pierce’, as a clue. Since Flitcraft, according to Spade, did not ‘even kn[o]w he had settled back naturally in the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma’ (p. 64), this assumed identity is not deliberate and thus, the meaning is to be located extradiegetically, over his head. This allows for a differentiated reading of the parable: as a gnostic revelation of randomness on the one hand, and as a recuperation of randomness by habit on the other.

The falling beam that missed him by an inch is seen as a sign by Flitcraft. It is a beam of light, a message from above. The scar that he wears, and rubs ‘affectionately’ is visible evidence of his election, not so much because he had been spared, but because ‘somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works’ (p. 63). His experience is one of gnosis. Looking into the abyss, Flitcraft has seen what is normally hidden: the mechanics of life as a worksite filled with architectural ‘skeletons’ whose parts are barely held together by beams susceptible of falling. The material world has been poorly designed by a sloppy demiurge – it is a world of disorder and meaninglessness that reveals one’s current existence as illusory, a mere construct and a fragile one at that. For Gnosticism, the world we know is a massive illusion engineered by an impostor. And because it is made of matter, or inferior material, this world of illusion is subject to entropy – it is falling apart. What we perceive as order is a precarious appearance concealing absolute randomness, as Flitcraft realises it:

What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By that time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. [Hammett, 1992, p. 64]

By seeking to harmonise his life with a random world, however, Flitcraft ironically reproduces a degree of order through repetition. His wild gesture of departure is recuperated by habit, a doubly pessimistic destiny. The escape from material illusion can only be short-lived. Beyond pointing to the inability of the two protagonists to transcend their respective identities as frozen by habit (Brigid will cheat and lie, Spade will hunt her down), the outcome, and possible meaning, of the parable (Spade having no difficulty in locating Flitcraft) shows the irruption of truth as difference lapsing into mere predictability.

This consideration about the relation between chance and habit allows for a closer examination of the intradiegetic allusion to Charles Sanders Peirce16. Peirce articulates tychism (from the Greek τύχη: ‘chance’) with synechism (from the Greek συνεχής: ‘continuous’), or science of probability, the former being somewhat subordinated to the latter. Thanks to the theory of continuity, generalisation is possible, and Peirce thus blurs the boundary between ‘deduction’ (logical inference) and ‘induction’ (probability), usually considered an inferior form of logic. Detective work, or ratiocination, involves the third mode of logic, ‘abduction’, forming a conclusion based on valid but partial premise. For Peirce, the world is plastic, it is not a static set of laws but a dynamic set of relations that constantly evolve. Laws are creatively violated for new laws to take their place: this is how chance settles into habit, as illustrated by the Flitcraft parable. Interestingly, it is in an essay about logics – the title of which uses terms familiar to detective fiction: ‘Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis’ – that Peirce says that we do not so much ‘have’ habits as habits have us: ‘That a habit is a rule active in us, is evident’ (Peirce, 1965, p. 643). This allows us to accommodate the world. Although not a gnostic, Peirce shares some of the premises of Gnosticism in seeing the material world as an aggression towards the mind, and the mind resorting to knowledge as a means to defend itself against disruption:

The important point [is] that the sense of externality in perception consists in a sense of powerlessness before the overwhelming force of perception. Now the only way in which any force can be learned is by something like trying to oppose it. That we do something like this is shown by the shock we receive from any unexpected experience. [Peirce, 1965, p. 334]

The Aristotelian ‘desire to know’ takes an ambivalent form with Peirce. It is both a vital impulse and a conservative or homeostatic attempt to regain a sense of familiarity with the world; the reality of which is not bracketed, as opposed to Cartesianism. By emphasizing ‘a sense of externality’, Peirce nods towards a metaphysical dimension independent from human perspective and resistant to the reductiveness of human reason.

In his essay on detective fiction, Bloch goes back to Oedipus, a prerequisiteto discuss the form, but he uniquely emphasises its motif of the foundling to articulate the moment of discovery (unmasking) with that of anteriority of the event that happens outside of the story, ‘like the Fall from grace or even the Fall of the Angels’ (Bloch, 1980, p. 43). The frustrated impulse towards knowledge that remains forever inaccessible is the ‘search for that remoter something’ (p. 32), that is also to be found in myth and metaphysics; the unmasking or the discovery of what was before:

The common denominator [between various ruminations of the speculative variety] is the process of uncovering, whereby in this case the presupposition is that a veiled misdeed precedes the creation of the world itself. [Bloch, 1980, p. 46]

This is the very definition of Gnostic metaphysics.

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