Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)

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The Detective and the Witness: An Ethical Friendship in Julian Barnes' Arthur and George / Soo Kim

 

<1> Despite the remarkable diversity of their material and style, the novels of Julian Barnes are widely considered to be postmodernist works, which employ meta-narrative and intertextuality in order to problematize the notion of truth. Tellingly, Barnes notes in an interview that "I haven't read any literary theory" (Freiburg 52). For Barnes, "to fit novels into some constructed grid," such as "Derridaish prose," "makes the whole thing much less clear than it was in the first place" (Ibid.). Calling postmodernist techniques of intertextuality and palimpsest "grotesque" (60), Barnes discounts postmodernist play with the text and the past. While Barnes believes that his novels speak plainly enough without any theoretical tool, the reviewers of his latest novel Arthur and George beg to differ. The novel revolves around Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated creator of Sherlock Homes, and his brief and odd friendship with George Edalji, young solicitor of Parsee descent, as imagined by Barnes. As Arthur's investigation on the mysterious mutilations of horses of which George is falsely accused proves much less riveting than Holmes' sleuthing, the novel ends with George's visitation with a séance for Arthur's ghost twenty-three years after their last meeting. In addition to this baffling storyline, other puzzling moments of Arthur and George fluster the reviewers, leading them to conclude with either of the following assessments of the novel: a "failed" detective novel or a "failed" postmodern novel. Most reviewers read Arthur and George in the light of detective fiction and indicate that Arthur's sleuthing fails to live up to the expectations of Holmes readers. Michiko Kakutani regrets that "the reader doesn't experience the thrill of putting together clues…but feels bombarded by a blizzard of boring bits of data." Similarly, Robert Winder remarks that the "climax is almost a disappointment" because Barnes leaves the whodunit question unanswered.

<2> Reviews with a postmodernist reading frame focus on the novel's "meditation on narrative" (Bernstein), but remain equally dissatisfied with Barnes' novel. If Terry Eagleton cogently states that Arthur and George is "more about epistemology than [George] Edalji," Eagleton considers the novel to be "curiously depthless." This is because, Eagleton argues, "Barnes has little to add to…the instability of truth, the merest cliché of postmodern art." Above all, reviewers are reticent as to the last séance scene where the ghost of the late Arthur is evoked. When some of the reviews refer to the scene, they do not delve into its enigma, or dismiss it as a "giant festival of stupidity" (Lanchester). In the sense that few reviews from the perspectives of conventional detective fiction or the postmodernist novel generate a fruitful reading of Arthur and George, these reviews validate Barnes' mistrust of theory. It is little wonder that Barnes discredits reviews of his work [1].

<3> This essay attempts to illuminate the significance of Arthur and George's perplexing narrative and inscrutable scenes that do not neatly fit into the detective story or the postmodernist category, using the thoughts of Emmanuel Levinas. While the reductionist reviews of Arthur and George call for a full-fledged reading apparatus corresponding to the novel's complexity, my essay does not merely aim at countering Barnes' despise of theory. Rather, this essay wishes to redeem the value of the dialogue between literature and philosophy, a type of abstruse and seemingly "impractical" dialogue. As Paul Gilroy asserts the need to abandon the "ultratheoretical mode…of multiculture, tolerance and otherness" (16) of current academia, an antipathy to theoretical and philosophical readings of literature and culture has recently emerged in the form of, among others, a scepticism towards Levinasian ethics. Following Alain Badiou's famous question, "Does the Other exist?" (18), critics indicate the "oppressively homogenizing" dimension of the Levinasian Other (Buell 16), and the "paralyzing impossibility" of an ethics subjugated to the inaccessible Other (Hallward xxxvi) [2]. Has the Levinasian reading of literature been celebrated as a new mode of postcolonial reading, or condemned as a "recolonization of western literature with its quasi-Christian ethics," to brand Levinas as representing either of these positions is not the goal of this essay [3]. For me, the core of Levinas' philosophy lies in its resistance to the systemization of thoughts and a radical reconceptualization of theory as complication and equivocation. Philip Goodchild argues that philosophy lives off "the surplus value of problematization," and does not aim to "answer the question" or "resolve the problem" (43). That is to say, philosophy's virtue is to leave the question unresolved, so as to rethink it and to encounter something "unthinkable or impossible at the heart of thought" (Ibid.). In the same way, Levinasian reading has little interest in theorizing the novel—finalizing its meaning and judging it to be good or bad—than in inviting the reader to think again what appears to be "isolating, estranging, difficult, and demanding" (Butler 203) in the novel. In response to a philosophy attempting to systemize thoughts, Levinas observes that "the best thing about philosophy is that it fails" (qtd. in MacDonald 190). This philosophy without "finality" or "totality" brings to life Arthur and George's indeterminacy (Ibid.).

<4> The first section of this essay examines Barnes' use of the metaphysical detective story that transforms Arthur's failed detection into an ethical possibility. The metaphysical detective story replaces the whodunit question with the epistemological question of the (im)plausibility of truth and narration, two synonymous words in Barnes' novel due to Arthur's sleuth-writer status. Drawing on the work of Levinas, I propose that Arthur and George's deconstruction of narratology conventionalized in metaphysical detection, what I call "anti-narrative," opens up the possibility of narrating the unnarratable Other. In the second section, I discuss Arthur and George's themes of recognition and vision in relation to race. While victims of oppression struggle for recognition and visibility, recognizer and recognizee replicate the master/slave and the self/other relation. Arthur's attempt to "save" George by rendering him recognizable in the society presupposes Arthur's superiority. Yet, the pervasive ocular themes of this novel reconceive the traditional notion of vision, an objectifying and alienating gaze, as a communication with the invisible. This new concept of vision is best illustrated in the last séance scene. In conclusion, I borrow Kelly Oliver's term "witnessing beyond recognition," and argue that Arthur and George's friendship exemplifies the movement from recognition rooted in the master/slave relation to witnessing an ethical (im)possibility of seeing the invisible Other with the eyes of love and responsibility.

<5> If Levinasian ethics is instrumental to understanding Arthur's unsuccessful detecting that is nonetheless ethical for the very sense of failure, George's witnessing (or not) of Arthur's ghost cannot be fully appreciated without deconstructing such binaries as visibility/invisibility, life/death, past/future, and the self/other. Like Levinas' philosophy, deconstruction suggests not only a better way of interpreting Arthur and George without pinning it down, but also a new way to read contemporary fiction in the "post-political" world. In an interview, Barnes identifies his novel's theme as "Britishness and race." Inspired by the Dreyfus Affair, the contemporary French case of judicial injustice based on race, Barnes portrays the British way of resolving and forgetting a problem: "Something is broken. We fix it. We forget it was broken" (qtd. in Solomon). George is imprisoned by the chief constable's hunch that "he [George] will do something. I know he will do something" (98), solely due to George's skin color. Once George is released with no acquittal, his case is as readily forgotten by everybody. In the post-9/11 world where racial profiling is intensified, a novel that recollects the intersection of Britishness and race may well attract a postcolonial reading. This reading, however, proves unproductive insofar as Arthur and George do not rise above imperialists. George never loses his faith in "the beating heart of the Empire" (19) even after he has been betrayed by it. Arthur, the epitome of the "English" gentleman and Edwardian knight, displays his imperialist masculinity via his extraordinary sportsmanship, which recasts the "violent, dirty and immoral business" of the Empire as "essentially a form of sport" (Gilroy 93-94) [4]. I argue that Barnes' novel is not interested in labeling Arthur the colonizer/savior and George the colonized/victim. Rather than reinforcing the center/margin and the colonizer/colonized dyad assumed in postcolonial discourse, Arthur and George moves beyond these binaries. When the division between friend and enemy, Right and Left, and us and them is not clear-cut, and when both parties are guided by self-interests and global capital (hence, "post-political"), Barnes' novel offers a new post-political ethicism by reopening a curious case of two radically different men. Their brief acquaintanceship looks forward to a friendship not founded upon affinity, proximity, and utility. Rather, it proposes an ethical friendship beyond the political distinction between friend and enemy.

 

Arthur: the Metaphysical Detective

<6> In Detecting Texts, Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney define the metaphysical detective story as the text that "parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions—such as narrative closure and the detective's role as surrogate reader—with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot" (2). Germinating from Edgar Allan Poe's "self-reflexive, philosophical, consciously literary detective stories in the 1840s" (4), metaphysical detective stories share six characteristic themes, all of which are richly deployed in Arthur and George. These themes include "the defeated sleuth," "the world or text as labyrinth," "the purloined letter or text as object," "the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness, or sheer meaninglessness of clues and evidences," "the double, lost, stolen, or exchanged identity," and "the absence, falseness, or self-defeating nature of any kind of closure to the investigation" (8) [5]. Until Arthur and George first meet each other on page 227, the first half of the novel builds up the reader's expectation of the Holmsian world of certainty. Brief chapters entitled "Arthur" or "George" take turns as they chronicle the exhilarating life of Arthur, the renowned, 48-year-old doctor-writer, and the growth of George, a Parsee vicar's 27-year-old son, whose uptight yet self-sufficient life as a solicitor is soon to be crushed by a groundless conviction and three years of imprisonment. As the one who understands "the essential connection between narrative and reward" (12), Arthur eagerly sets off on an "adventure" (242; 252) of "rescuing" George, befriended by his assistant Woodie, surrogate Dr. Watson. Arthur's investigation of the writer of hoax letters and the mutilator of animals appears to reiterate Holmes' adventure stories of positivistic detection in the 1890s. But Arthur's "resolution" of the crime—the sudden discovery of a horse lancet that might have been used for mutilation and of the name of Royden Sharp who supposedly owned the lancet but has been long missing—yields a sense of disappointment, not of triumph:

"It's not meant to happen like this," said Arthur. "I should know. I've written it enough times. It's not meant to happen by following simple steps. It's meant to be utterly insoluble right up until the end. And then you unravel the knot with one glorious piece of deduction, something entirely logical yet quite astounding, and then you feel a great sense of triumph."

"Which you don't?" [said Woodie]

"Now? No, I feel almost disappointed. Indeed, I do feel disappointed." (315)

In this quotation, Arthur's idealism of the bedazzling Holmsian deduction of truth is ridiculed as nonexistent, or existent only in what Anson, the chief constable, calls Arthur's "paid imagination" (292). Barnes' sarcastic portrayal of the Holmes method foreshadows the historical Doyle's decision to let Holmes bow out of the game on the verge of World War I, when Doyle recognized that "even the combination of towering intellect and rabbinical solutions was doomed to fail" in a world entirely gone awry (Ewert 193). The above quotation also demonstrates "the sheer meaninglessness of clues and evidences," one of the six characteristics of the metaphysical detection. This is because the discovery of the crime weapon, which Arthur complains has come too easily, turns out to be useless in disentangling the mystery. Arthur's sense of disappointment is exacerbated into anger, frustration, and disillusionment when he learns from the Report of Gladstone Committee that George is both "guilty and innocent." This result makes Arthur a "defeated sleuth," another trait often employed in metaphysical detective stories. Left with a labyrinth of eerie letters and a horse lancet without the sender or the mutilator, Arthur's belief in the obviousness of the ending is shattered: Arthur used to ask, "how can you make sense of the beginning unless you know the ending?" (59). The titles of the second and the third chapter of the novel, "Beginning with an Ending" versus "Ending with a Beginning," aptly convey this transition from the traditional to the metaphysical detective story. The unnerving absence of the narrative and the investigative closure culminates at the last séance scene. Far from resolving conflicts and "confirming the existing definitions of the world" (Cawelti 35), as conventional detective stories do, Arthur and George's final séance raises a set of epistemological and ontological questions in order to suggest that "the proper end of a true mystery story can only be a deepened sense of the mystery of what we have seen or are seeing or will see" (Rafferty 11).

<7> Arthur serves as a felicitous example of the metaphysical detective insofar as his defeated detection leads him to look into himself and declare that "he has been born for something else" (213). Arthur's new-found awareness of himself constitutes an important component of the metaphysical detective, the theme of identity, or the lack thereof. While the metaphysical detective strives to solve the mystery of a crime, what he or she finally confronts is not the truth of "who is guilty" but a new perturbing question of "who is not guilty." In other words, Arthur's investigation reveals less about missing criminals' whereabouts than more about himself, especially his flaws. For instance, when George realizes that Arthur's case against Royden Sharp is no less biased than the constabulary's case against George, Arthur becomes guilty, and the "detective oftentimes becomes the murderer he has been seeking" in a metaphysical and metaphorical sense (Sweeney 253). For another example, a short chapter in which a horse is mutilated for the first time is titled "George and Arthur" although neither of them appears in it. This seemingly unrelated event, however, happens to be what conjoins the lives of Arthur and George in an unexpected way. These examples illustrate that one's identity is inseparable from a larger web of human experience that derives from "the meeting," what Levinas defines as "the primary act of being" (LR 65) [6]. Left with no identified criminal but his own criminality, the conclusion that the metaphysical detective invariably reaches is the "unknowability" and the "ineffability" of the world and the self (Merivale and Sweeney 4). While the metaphysical detective's inability to know the world and the self often renders him disturbed and disillusioned, my contention is that Arthur and George moves beyond this sense of disillusionment by turning the impossibility of identity into the possibility of a new ethical subjectivity built through the encounter with the Other [7].

<8> As is shown in Barnes' use of "he" for both George and Arthur in the same chapter ("He [George] was free. And then he [Arthur] meets Jean" (170)), Barnes' novel blurs the distinction between Arthur and George in order to embody what Levinas calls "the interval between the I and Thou" (LR 66). This interval offers the very site where being can be "construed as the possibility of both distancing and relatedness" (Ibid.). The wandering between the I and the Thou without identity or a fixed destination characterizes that which I call "anti-narrative," whose ethical potential springs from its refusal to be fossilized into a totalizing narrative. If the primal Western narrative is best represented in Odyssey, a story of departure-discovery-return home, Michael MacDonald argues that Odyssey's circularity shores up the "bond between narrative and totality" (183). According to MacDonald, the etymological filiations between "knowledge" and "narrative" exhibit the way that "knowledge is formed by gathering the dispersed events of experience into the coherent order of a tale, story, or narrative" (184). In the process of assembling the events of being into "the fixed order of representations and the 'already said' of a fable, story, or narrative" (189), the narrative runs a risk of misrepresenting what is incomprehensible to being, that is, the Other. To put it differently, inasmuch as the I and the Other by definition will never share a frontier nor form a system or a totality, the Other eludes the grasp of representational thinking and is uncontainable within a story. MacDonald indicates that if Hegel's journeying subject pursues self-knowledge bound by the "plot of the absolute" (183), Levinas' unnarratable Other emerges in the "plot of ethics" (191) in which knowledge cannot grasp the Other. That is to say, the Hegelian travelogue of ontology circles back to the absolute and the graspable, but the Levinasian anti-narrative of the Other departs without return and "wanders on a uncharted course from ontology to ethics, totality to infinity, and said to saying" (192).

<9> Arthur and George describes this wandering between ontology and ethics, totality and infinity, and said and saying. In showcasing this wandering, Barnes' novel presents an array of false narrations inflected by memory and a shift from the realm of memory, embodied in these inaccurate narratives, to the immemorial and the infinite unconstrained by memories. As the author known for his ingenious use of meta-narrative and intertextuality, Barnes invents fictional and historical narratives within the novel such as hoax letters, court testimonies, newspaper articles, and Arthur's writings. These narratives reveal all kinds of defects a story can have, from the factual errors of newspaper articles (George's father is a Parsee, not a Hindu, and his mother is Scottish, not English) to the chief constable Anson's baseless racist discourse, from the blatant lies of an orthographical expert's court testimony to the fabrication of George's crime on the part of the prosecution. Lastly but not least, Arthur's written investigation on the Edalji case, Arthur notices, bears a striking resemblance to starting a fiction ("You had your beginning, and you had your ending" (256)), and is fictitious in large part. George is the only one who discerns "his story in ever-diverging form" (153) during the trials and learns that "repetition makes plausibility" (135). Memories and Adventures, Arthur's autobiography "work[ed] from memory, from the version of events he had himself told and retold down the years" (363), concocts many parts of George's case eighteen years ago. These examples evince that the events of being are assimilated by memory into the same, so as to be comprehensible and be molded into knowledge. For Levinas, knowledge is unethical because it assumes "ontological privileges" and connotes grasping, re-presentation, a return to presence, self-sufficiency, and the appropriation of being (LR 62). Levinas finds memory equally totalizing and unethical: "memory, seeking after lost time, procures dreams, but does not restore the lost occasions" (TI 281). That is, memory permanently reiterates "an already heard narration" (Herzog 343). In the sense that the I and the Other will never comprise a totality rooted in shared memories, "a communication with being" and the commitment to the Other occurs only in the realm of the immemorial (LR 62).

<10> The diachrony of the immemorial, where the face-to-face encounter with the Other takes place, signifies a "pure becoming…that will never solidify into a narrative [or] develop itself in the totality of the Said" (MacDonald 190). The idea of the immemorial, along with that of infinity and alterity, exceeds the subject's ability to think. In Levinas' words, "a thought that thinks more than it thinks is a desire," and only desire can "measure" the "infinity of the infinite" (CPP 56). George's desire to see the ghost of Arthur in the séance exemplifies this measurement of the "infinity of the infinite," because such desire to see the invisible is beyond comprehension but embodies an ethical desire to face the invisible Other. In this way, Arthur and George creates not a narrative but a desire to narrate the unnarratable that cannot be enclosed within memory. Arthur's failure to uncover the identity of the criminal deconstructs the positivistic detective narrative and metamorphoses "an adventure of the absolute" into "an absolute adventure" (MacDonald 192). In this ethical adventure, the omnipotent sleuth is summoned by the face of the Other and ends up wandering in time immemorial with no promise of return. In reworking the metaphysical detective's (de)feat of narration and detection from an ethical perspective, Arthur and George transcends the limits of a totalizing narrative through the "desire" to narrate the Other. This desire, immeasurable and immemorial, is destined to be unfulfilled, but "becomes" an ethical responsibility to the Other that is beyond time and comprehension.

George: the Witness

<11> In the prior section, I analyze how Arthur's failed quest for identity and knowledge enables him to break away from the circular narrative of departure-discovery-return home and to wander between the I and the Other in an anti-narrative. An attempt to encounter the unaccountable Other in order not to grapple with it but to communicate with it would require some other mode of perceiving than recognition and visualization. This section begins with a criticism of recognition, an important concept of ontology, and discusses George's witnessing as a new way of communicating with the invisible Other in place of recognition and visualization. I contend that the séance scene deconstructs the epistemological bifurcation between the visible and the invisible and redefines vision as "the result of the circulation of energies" (Oliver 15). This expanded notion of vision allows for an addressing of the invisible Other.

<12> Oliver argues that the dominant theory of recognition since Hegel presumes the antagonistic polarization of identity/difference, subject/other, and master/slave. While multiculturalism, critical race theory, queer theory, feminist theory, and social movements are struggles for recognition, victims of oppression and slavery seek not just visibility and recognition but a witnessing to sufferings beyond recognition. Insofar as recognizer and recognizee reproduce the master/slave and the subject/other relationship, Oliver argues, the need for recognition from the dominant group or culture is in itself a symptom of the pathology of oppression. In this oppressive relationship, "any real contact with difference or otherness becomes impossible because recognition requires the assimilation of difference into something familiar" (9). In a similar manner, Levinas indicates that the complete openness of a subject necessary for the communication with the Other is impossible "if it's on the watch for the recognition or the spectacle of the other" (OB 119). This is because, for a recognizer, every other is "only a limitation that invites war, domination, [and] information" (Ibid). Oliver's and Levinas' explanations of recognition underscore the link between recognition and power, and describe the notion of vision as the objectifying and alienating gaze of the dominant.

<13> Barnes' novel scrutinizes all spectra of vision in order to make room for a new notion of vision not confined to the oppressive gaze. While the novel's very first sentence, "A child [Arthur] wants to see," reveals a boy's curiosity that develops into an adult's yearning for vision and knowledge, its last sentences, "what does he [George] see? What did he see? What will he see?" conclude—or, rather open—the novel with a new meditation on vision beyond visibility. On the one hand, Arthur's belief in "looking" demonstrates the Western privileging of vision as conducive to knowledge: "Arthur believed in looking…He recognized that knowledge never stayed still…Therefore, the intellectual duty to continue looking never ceased" (41-42). For Arthur, the goal of scientific knowledge is to render the world transparent so that everything in it is made visible and graspable to the "purblind" humanity: "the invisible and the impalpable…are increasingly being made visible and palpable. The world and its purblind inhabitants are at last learning to see" (214). As Arthur refers to the contemporary invention of X-rays, he announces: "I can only work with the clear white light of knowledge" (209). Since Plato, Western philosophy has been characterized as a struggle to avoid seeing the untrue embodied in a false replica mirrored on the cave wall and to search for the "light" of truth, the original residing outside the dark cave. Upon undertaking the project of "rescuing" George, Arthur declares the "time for action and anger" and promises George that "[he is] going to make a great deal of noise" resorting to his social fame (original italics 236). On the other hand, when Arthur's public campaign for the recognition of George produces a result far from satisfaction, it is the myopic and reticent George who remarks: "Heat did not always produce light, and noise did not always produce locomotion" (337). The paradox of George's myopia, which nonetheless makes him a "first-class witness" (235), and the ophthalmologist's overconfidence in looking, which hardly serves to unravel the mysterious crime, shows the need to rethink the authority of recognition prioritizing the visible and audible over the invisible and inaudible.

<14> Arthur's strategy of making George hypervisible does not offer an ethical solution to the problem of the invisibility of minorities insofar as George is always already hypervisible for his skin color. Called names such as "mongrel," "darkie," "Manchoo," "odd-looking," and "typical Oriental," George is labeled a highly visible other. Even though George is an Englishman "by birth, by citizenship, by education, by religion, [and] by profession" (235), the hypervisibility of a racialized other makes George's assimilation to England never complete. George illustrates an acute understanding of Englishness in innumerable places of the novel "because George was English himself" (360), but it is Arthur who is unanimously viewed as the "very ideal of an English gentleman" (360) in spite of his being "Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth, instructed in the faith of Rome by Dutch Jesuits" (25). Arthur's romanticized identification of himself as an "unofficial Englishman" (235) does not undermine his Englishness owing to his normalizing masculine whiteness. This comprises the reason why the face-to-face encounter with the Other must take place in the time immemorial free from the particular story of the I or the Other. As Levinas observes, "the best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes" (qtd. in Herzog 335). In the time immemorial, the future does not come after the present. It lies beyond the horizon of my time, what Levinas calls "the time of the Other," where I am obligated to be responsible for the Other with no regards to his visible differences. The last séance scene of Arthur and George renounces both invisibility and hypervisibility in order to enter the Other's time, an ethical future where only the alterity of death awaits to be "seen."

<15> The last séance scene of Barnes' novel urges the reader to shift focus from the traditional notion of vision that divides invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility, to an extended notion of vision as "connection and communion" (Oliver 200). Drawing on various studies of vision from Merleau-Ponty's to Irigaray's, Oliver argues that visual systems are "intermodal" and work with other senses and their surroundings in order to produce sight [8]. That is to say, vision is a medium floating in space and creates "affective energy [that] migrates between people" (195). Examples of the "social electricity" sparked by vision are found in "a powerful religious service, a rock concert, [and] a political rally" (197). I would add Arthur and George's séance scene to this list, in which people communicate with "active silence, filled with anticipation and even passion" (374). Oliver continues to note that vision is tactile: it "touches and caresses" open and closed eyes as it creates "the between" (original italics 210). Neither an alienating void nor an unbridgeable distance, Oliver's conceptualization of "the between" is suggestive of Levinas' "interval" and Derrida's "pure interval" that implicate both distance and proximity. In this sense, the visible and the invisible are "counterparts" (201), not the opposites.

<16> As I mention in the introduction of this essay, Arthur and George's ending poses a challenge to readers and reviewers. Two-thirds of the last "Endings" chapter is George's contemplation on Britishness and his current happy, if not sought for, life with his sister Maud on his way to Albert Hall for the séance. George's "tenderest of emotions towards Maud" and his belief in "the general disadvantages of a wife" (365) make a peculiar comment on Arthur's marriage, a "damned puzzling bliss" (322), which engendered an inner tempest of guilt and dishonor in Arthur's mind. Finally accepted as "invisible" in his alternative marriage with Maud, George reminisces that "his obscurity was something to do with England itself": the English way is that "[s]omething was wrong, something was broken, but now it has been repaired, so let us pretend that nothing much was wrong in the first place" (360). While George's composed yet penetrating commentaries may well conclude the novel, Barnes borrows from a historical source and stages a last encounter between George and the postmortem Arthur.

<17> Before I move on to Arthur's turn to "spritism" and his wish for a séance, a brief explanation of British occultism at the time appears necessary. In contrast of the general belief that spiritualism is an irrational vogue, a fin-de-siècle phenomenon, Alex Owen argues that the late-Victorian occultism constitutes the dialectic of modernity along with modern Weberian disenchantment. Less an abandonment of the pursuit of knowledge than a desire for "fuller" knowledge that sublimates the rationalizing scientific intellect, late-Victorian occultism pursued a holistic approach to modern subjectivity. Influenced by Bergson's philosophy of intuition and Nietzsche's Übermensch philosophy, occultists believed that "intellect is unable to conceptualize anything that operates outside the existing framework of natural law" (136). Instead, they explored the mystical ways of a new self-consciousness, "a vast labyrinth, possibly only ever partially knowable, and possessed of a hidden but frighteningly powerful realm" (119). Arthur's preoccupation with tangible scientific knowledge, which matches his soaring masculinity, reflects subjectivity based on "Victorian scientism and 'the cult of positivism'" (142) that occultists strived to contradict. A skier and player of tennis, golf, billiards, bowling, cricket, football on stilts, and the banjo and bombardon tuba, the handsome and versatile Arthur advocates simple straightforwardness in life: "you look a fellow in the eye, you speak the truth, and you take the consequences: such is the Doyle creed" (189). A man of "excess of enthusiasm" (328), who sleeps "as if it were part of life's business, rather than an interlude from it" (201), Arthur embarks upon the Edalji case for an exalting combination of an adventure and a great cause. Before Arthur is struck lethargic by the "practical difficulty, ethical impasse and sexual frustration" (185) that result from his extramarital affair with Jean, he has only a mild curiosity in spiritualism, reading the book of Leigh Hunt, popular contemporary psychic.

<18> Arthur's "sudden wonder" springing from his relationship with Jean, who is "direct, frank, open-minded" (181), does not come through without guilt and the realization of "the complication of life" (182): "honour and dishonour lie so close together" (204). It is Arthur's desperate attempt to maintain his romantic notion of honor, built in the context of the "long-gone, long-remembered, long-invented world of chivalry" (25) of King Arthur, that launches Sir Arthur's effort to help out George, a lower knight of the band. Arthur's questioning of his integrity due to the affair and his subsequent failure to resolve George's case even with material evidences lead to the shift of his interest from the physical and material to the psychical. My contention is that this shift, far from irresponsible escapism, signifies Arthur's ethical maturation. As Arthur learns to "traverse the permeable boundary between the personal self and the spiritual 'other' of the other world" (Owen 129), he comes to view death not as a "closed door but [as] a greater capacity" (231). In consequence, Arthur becomes dedicated to enlarge the notion of knowledge and progress: "Why did people imagine that progress consisted of believing in less, rather than believing in more, in opening yourself to more of the universe?" (286). I do not claim that Arthur makes a neat transition from his objectifying scientism to his encounter with the Other. Rather, Arthur and George gradually advances Arthur's questioning of his identity and burgeoning interest in spiritism throughout the novel, interweaving them with his adamant, oftentimes hilarious, positivism, until his defeated detection intimates a whole new ethical possibility. Barnes' novel leaps from the aftermath of the Edalji campaign and Arthur's second wedding to Jean in 1907 to the séance in 1930, leaving Arthur's story for twenty-three years unnarrated. There is no textual proof of Arthur's ethical cultivation during this period in the novel, although a few historical sources note the deepened interest in spiritualism of the historical Doyle after World War I [9]. Yet, the absence of a narration in Arthur and George is tellingly pregnant with the possibility of reading the séance in a creative way.

<19> George finds the séance for Arthur strange: although the séance is for the dead, it elicits "directness," "freshness," and "cheerfulness verging on passion" (372). As opposed to the deliberately saddening "official silence," George feels the active silence of the service equivalent to "suppressed noise" (374). Not knowing "whether he has seen truth or lies, or a mixture of both" (385), George's response to the ceremony oscillates between "all hocus-focus" (374) and "a kind of cautious awe" (383). The confusion and the discomfort with which George witnesses the postmortem Arthur, whose death cannot be seen even with George's "succession of lenses" (386)—his glasses and binoculars—illustrate the difficulty of witnessing the Other. As Levinas points out, "the relationship with the other is not an idyllic and harmonious relationship of communion, or a sympathy" (LR 43). Levinas uses a metaphor of paternity to explain the relationship without sympathy: "Paternity is not a sympathy through which I can put myself in the son's place. It is through my being, not through sympathy, that I am my son" (LR 52). Arthur, whom George calls his "third parent" (352), becomes George not because they share a sympathy and proximity but because they are related to each other via their beings. This relation without proximity is conveyed in the paradox of seeing the dead with "the eyes of faith:"

The eyes of faith. The eyes Sir Arthur brought with him when they met at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. He had believed in George; should George now believe in Sir Arthur? His champion's words: I do not think, I do not believe, I know. Sir Arthur carried with him an enviable, comforting sense of certainty. (original italics 384)

When George recalls Arthur's words "I know," the verb has little to do with "a comprehension that encompasses" (TI 34). The "I" means "Here I am, answering for everything and for everyone" (original italics; OB 114). In this sense, "I know" does not stand for encompassing knowledge, but indicates the I 's understanding that he is always there as a passive hostage to the Other. One may well wonder in what form the relation with an absolute alterity that is neither visible nor graspable can exist. Levinas clarifies that "[i]nvisibility does not denote an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea" (TI 34). For examples of "what is not given," Levinas locates death, future, and the Other within the same constellation because the relationships with all of these "will never be the feat of grasping possibility" (LR 43). The novel's séance sets an opportune stage of death and future where George, via his strong desire to see the face of his dead friend, creates an ethical relation that does not risk possessing the Other.

<20> If Arthur's first encounter with the falsely accused George in 1906 involves justice codified by law, George's encounter with the late Arthur, or his desire to encounter him for all its impossibility, reveals another dimension of justice that is not written. Levinas acknowledges the necessity of judiciary justice in order for signification to signify: the modes of signification would include "assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces…the intelligibility of a system, and thence also a copresence on an equal footing as before a court of justice" (OB 157). What is more ancient and more just than the equality implied in judiciary justice, however, is justice for the other: "justice passes by justice in my responsibility for the other, in my inequality with respect to him" (OB 158). I argue that this justice beyond justice, what Derrida names a democracy without "the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema" (388), best describes the relationship between Arthur and George, an ethical friendship still to come. In "The Politics of Friendship," Derrida states that a new democracy entails "asymmetrical curvature" and "infinite alterity" (366) distinguished from inequality or superiority. As Arthur's brother-in-law jocularly remarks, all that Arthur and George have in common is "sentences" (326). Their lack of commonalties disrupts the fraternal symmetry of traditional friendship in terms of age, social status, race, and the type of masculinity. The invisibility and the silence of the séance erase Arthur and George's discernible differences, their virtues and vices, so as to eliminate the superiority of the one over the other and manifest the infinite heterogeneity of beings. Derrida's repeated use of the Aristotelian epithet, "O my friends, there is no friend," highlights the absence of this ethically just friendship in the present. Belonging to the experience of "waiting" and "prayer," the Derridean friendship has yet to come in the form of a communication that "relate[s] us to one another in the difference and the silence of speech" (387). Arthur and George's friendship, which can be only glimpsed at via their invisible and inaudible communication, exceeds any interest that might be gained from this relationship because of one friend's death. An embodiment of ethical justice transcending legal and political justice, their friendship exists only in separation. George recollects: "They had last met twenty-three years ago; still, the link between them had somehow never been broken" (357).

<21> In the words of Oliver, "we are by virtue of our environment and by virtue of relationships with others" (original italics 11). Then, subjectivity must be founded upon "the ability to respond to, and address, others" (15); Oliver calls this ability "witnessing." Witnessing provides a felicitous term for the foundation of an ethical subjectivity on account of its two connotations: "eyewitness testimony based on firsthand knowledge" as in court, and "bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can't be seen" as in religion (original italics 16). Arthur and George's séance where George "bear[s] witness to his [Arthur's] passing over" expresses the second implication of witnessing (352). Insofar as subjectivity is constituted in "the infinite encounter with otherness" (Oliver 17), George's attempt to witness the invisible Arthur presages the advent of an ethical subjectivity rooted in "response-ability," a synonym of witnessing. In transforming George from the object of Arthur's recognition and investigation to the subject who is able to witness the invisible Other, Barnes' novel presents an ethical movement from recognition to witnessing.

<22> In Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy stresses the need to break with the ultra-theory of academia and undertake "much more direct confrontation" with the gruesome reality of supra-national politics today (16). While Gilroy's wariness of the theoretical and philosophical that loses sight of the political is entirely valid, the appeal to political practice amounts to no more than didacticism unless it looks forward to ethics. This is why Derrida's "Politics of Friendship" is about the ethics of friendship through which to anticipate "the 'come' of a certain democracy" (388). Similarly, the politics of writing the past must translate to an ethical opening up of a more just future. In Oliver's words, future justice is possible only by "reinvestigating the past over and over again in order to find places and moments of resistance to oppression that might open up a better future" (135). The importance of viewing the historian's past not as actualities but as possibilities, that is, the necessity of imagination in reading the past to rethink it, is what Arthur and George asks the reader. A powerful testimony of what has been invisible of history—the obscure yet life-changing friendship between Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji—Barnes' novel invites us to put an end to a mere recognition of the past and to witness what the reimagined past unfolds for us: the amusing possibility of seeing the late creator of Sherlock Holmes and his little-known companion.

 

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.

Barnes, Julian. Arthur and George. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Bernstein, Stephen. Review of Arthur and George. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 26.1 (Spring 2006): 146.

Buell, Lawrence. "Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics," PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7-19.

Butler, Judith. "Values of Difficulty." Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Eds. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 199-215.

Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Christian, Ed, ed. The Post-Colonial Detective. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave, 2001.

Critchley, Simon. "The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis." Critical Ethics: Text, Theory, and Responsibility. Eds. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 88-103.

Derrida, Jacques. "The Politics of Friendship." American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Culture 50 (1993): 353-91.

Eagleton, Terry. "The Facts." Review of Arthur and George. The Nation 20 February 2006: 34-36.

Ewert, Jeanne. "'A Thousand Other Mysteries:' Metaphysical Detection, Ontological Quests." Eds. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Detecting Texts: the Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999: 179-198.

Freiburg, Rudolf. "Novels Come Out of Life, Not Out of Theories." Interview with Julian Barnes. "Do You Consider Yourself a Postmodern Author?": Interviews with Contemporary English Writer. Eds. Rudolf Freiburg and Jan Schnitker. Münster: Lit; Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1999. 39-66.

Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melncholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Hale, Dorothy J. "Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century." PMLA 124.3 (May 2009): 896-905.

Goodchild, Philip. "Spirit of Philosophy: Derrida and Deleuze." Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humnaities 5.2 (August 2000). 43-57.

Hallward, Peter. Introduction to Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Alain Badiou. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001. vii-xlvii.

Herzog, Annabel. "Levinas, Memory, and the Art of Writing. The Philosophical Forum 36.3 (Fall 2005): 333-343.

Horsely, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Holquist, Michael. "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction." The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Eds. Glenn Most and William Stowe. New York: Hartcourt, 1983.

Irwin, John. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. When We Were Orphans. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Kakutani, Michiko. "Sherlock's Creator Gives Sleuth a Try." Review of Arthur and George. The New York Times 10 January 2006.

Kim, Soo. "Lost in Translation: The Multicultural Interpreter as Metaphysical Detective in Suki Kim's The Interpreter (2003)." Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. Eds. Marc Singer and Nels Pearson. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. 195-207.

Lanchester, John. "A Matter of English Justice." Review of Arthur and George. The New York Review of Books 53. 6 (2006): 12-15.

Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. New York: Blackwell, 1989.

---. Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Hingham, MA: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.

---. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1969.

---. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne: Pittsburgh, 1998.

MacDonald, Michael J. "Losing Spirit: Hegel, Levinas, and the Limits of Narrative." Narrative 13. 2 (May 2005): 183-194.

Matzke, Christine, and Susan Muhleisen, eds. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

McCann, Sean. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. "The Game's Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story." eds. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Detecting Texts: the Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 1-26.

Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2004.

---. "Borderland Forms: Arthur Conan Doyle, Albion's Daughters, and the Politics of Cottingley Fairies." History Workshop 38 (1994): 49-86.

Pearson, Nels and Marc Singer, eds. Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2009.

Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Rafferty, Terrence. "The Game's Afoot." Review of Arthur and George. The New York Times: Book Review 15 January 2006: 9-11.

Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.

Rodriguez, Ralph. Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Soitos, Stephen. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press, 1996.

Solomon, Deborah. "Rewriting History." Interview with Jualian Barnes. New York Times Magazine. 18 December 2005.

Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. "'Subject-Cases' and 'Book-Cases': Impostures and Forgeries from Poe to Auster." Detecting Texts: the Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 247-272.

Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Todorov, Tzvetan. "The Typology of Detective Fiction." The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. 42-52.

Winder, Robert. "Bumps in the Night." Review of Arthur and George. Newstatesman 11 July 2005.

 

Notes

[1] In the interview with Rudolf Freiburg, Barnes states that "I've never had a review which has told me something about the book that I didn't know already" (48). [^]

[2] Simon Chritchley's essay in 1999 summarizes how the canonization of Levinas has occurred in less than two decades. If Contemporary French Philosophy published in 1979 includes not a single word on Levinas, Levinas' work is nonetheless responsible for having made ethics "the most charged term in contemporary theory" (88) in the 1990s. Chritchley notes that it remains unclear whether "this canonization will result in expansion, explosion or slow flatulence" (89). Despite the emergent criticism towards the monolithic aspect of the Levinasian Other, critics continue to draw on, wittingly or not, Levinas' reconceptualization of ethics as relinquishing moral categories and epistemic judgment in their defenses of the "New Ethics." See Dorothy Hale's "Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century" (2009) and Judith Butler's "Values of Difficulty" (2003). In the latter essay, Butler argues that the novel asks the reader to "understand the limits of judgment and to cease judging, paradoxically, in the name of ethics, to cease judging in a way that assumes we already know in advance what there is to be known" (208). Butler's argument of "a different conception of ethics, one that honors what cannot be fully known or captured about the Other," is unmistakably Levinasian, even though Butler does not mention his name in her essay (Ibid.). [^]

[3] I owe this eye-opening view on Levinasian reading to the reader of the draft of this essay at Reconstruction. [^]

[4] Arthur and George does not tackle the premises of the Empire in which the novel is set and yields a sense of stalemate that the London bombing in July 2005, which occurred at the time of the publication of Barnes' novel, does little but enhance. Here lies the inefficacy of the postcolonial reading of Arthur and George. [^]

[5] While Merivale and Sweeney's monograph is the only one exclusively devoted to the discussion of the metaphysical detective story, this subgenre of crime fiction cannot be fully understood without considering its relation to postmodernity and postcoloniality. In the introduction to Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (2009), Marc Singer and Nels Pearson trace the steps whereby the detective novel, which was read to have "a set of conventions and formulas that reaffirm[ed] a culture's dominant ideology" in the 1970s, has come down to be viewed as a formally and narratologically diverse genre, "flourishing in multiple cultures, and engaged with the production of knowledge and transformation of consciousness within and across societies" (1-2). For further studies on the detective novel and its subgenres that interweave its popular genre conventions, "hermeneutic skepticism and generic self-reflexivity" (6) of the metaphysical detective story, and the "racial episteme" (5) popularized in postcolonial and transnational detective fictions, see: Tzvetan Todorov's "The Typology of Detective Fiction" (1977); Michael Holquist's "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction" (1983); Jon Thompson's Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism (1993); John Irwin's The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective (1994); Stephen Soitos' The Blues Detective (1996); Sean McCann's Gumshoe America (2000); Andrew Pepper's The Contemporary American Crime Novel (2000); Ed Christian's The Post-Colonial Detective (2001); Caroline Reitz' Detecting the Nation (2004); Lee Horsley's Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005); Ralph Rodriguez' Brown Gumshoes (2005); Christine Matzke and Susanne Muhleisen's Postcolonial Postmortems (2006); and my essay, "Lost in Translation: The Multicultural Interpreter as Metaphysical Detective in Suki Kim's The Interpreter (2003)," in Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. [^]

[6] Hereafter, Levinas' books are abbreviated as follows: LR for Levinas Reader, OB for Otherwise Than Being, TI for Totality and Infinity, and CPP for Collected Philosophical Papers. [^]

[7] The ironical effect of the final "truth," the coexistent senses of success and failure of the metaphysical detective, is one of the major features that other metaphysical detective stories share, from Edgar Allan Poe's seminal works in the late nineteenth century to the works of Jorge Louis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Suki Kim. The ending of Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (2000) would serve as a prime example. Ishiguro's novel follows the investigation of Christopher Banks, renowned detective in London circa the 1930s, into his parents, who were allegedly kidnapped for their political beliefs in Shanghai in the 1910s. The penultimate chapter of the novel reveals the disruptive truth: his father was not kidnapped for political reasons but ran off with his mistress; his mother, after being threatened by a Chinese warlord, agreed to a life as his concubine in exchange for an inheritance that would secure her son's future in London. The final truth of Ishiguro's novel fills Banks with disillusionment from his "enchanted world" (315) and enormous frustration as a detective, undermining the epistemology of the "truth quest" of the detective story. Nevertheless, no matter how disappointing the truth remains, the last chapter of When We Were Orphans reaffirms the validity of truth as it ends with Banks' new-found bond with his long-lost mother. Inasmuch as late is better than never, the dark truth is still worth detecting and results in Banks' better perception of himself, his family, and the world around him. Banks, a formerly proud detective who believed in the accountability of reality, now understands its ultimate ineffableness. Banks learns how to "face the world as orphans" (335) and concludes that "[t]here is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can" (336). This is the moment when the defeated detective becomes a metaphysical detective who meditates upon the upsetting truth that opens up a more profound question on the self and the world. [^]

[8] Oliver's radical redefinition of vision as touching, movement, caress, love, and air is largely indebted to works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Luce Irigaray, and Levinas. For Oliver's in-depth discussion of this reconceived notion of vision, see chapter 9 of Witnessing, "Toward a New Vision." [^]

[9] See Alex Owen's "Borderland Forms: Arthur Conan Doyle, Albion's Daughters, and the Politics of Cottingley Fairies" in History Workshop. [^]

 

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