Reconstruction 10.2 (2010)
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Body, Letter, and Voice: Constructing Knowledge in Detective Fiction.
Maria Plochocki. Peter Lang, 2010. 213 pp. $US 29.95 (list in softcover).
<1> Like many of the critical, scholarly investigations of detective fiction that I have read, Maria Plochocki's Constructing Knowledge begins with the now-familiar claim that the genre continues to be among those relegated to the spaces outside of "legitimate," established or even good literature (7). However, where Plochocki differs from most of her predecessors and contemporaries is in recognizing that the genre does attract considerable attention and in turning the focus of her study to the body. The two seem a fitting pair because detective fiction clearly constitutes something of a guilty pleasure among scholars and these kinds of pleasures constitute so much of the corpus of detective fiction. To be sure, Plochocki also hauls out another pair of guilty pleasures for scholars, namely the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and the semiotic analysis of Roland Barthes.
<2> It is the latter who reminds us that to read, "is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings and to find meanings is to name them" (as qtd 112). However, unlike her contemporaries, Plochocki focuses on the body that has no presence. Whether in Poe’s archetypal "Purloined Letter" or in Colin Dexter’s Detective Morse stories, the body is a sign, to be sure, but one that -- like musical signs, like poetic signs, like many indeterminate signs -- that means, even inheres via its absence. It is this absence which brings the heteroglossia into play, as it were. The detective not only hears but must consider the multitude of voices -- of the dead, of the suspects, of the witnesses, of the reader -- to become the one who knows how to know (13). Nowhere is this process more obvious or painstaking than when the detective is wrong, or worse, only acts to satisfy his own curiosity and his own ego.
<3> Not surprisingly, then, Plochocki also makes an effort to "relegitmize and revalorize" detective fiction, if not her theoretical positions (18). That said, such an approach--while admittedly ambitious--is not as implausible as one might be led to imagine because detective fiction, as Plochocki shows, tends be somewhat anachronistic in its pursuit of knowledge. As Plochocki puts it, rather than relying on and celebrating the scientific means of investigation (as one finds in film and television versions of the genre), in the novel one finds decidedly unscientific approaches that tend to be willfully so. Simply put, "Empirical evidence, even when furnished by bodies and their examination, does not suffice as it does not account for the variety of possible interpretations" (41). Moreover, as the detective is working through the case the narrative is also working through its own set of problems regarding the state of knowledge, truth and evidence. This is Morse at his best. He is most at home solving a case that has been solved, or so everyone else believes. Plochocki would not be out of order in stating that the case is the body as far as Morse is concerned. It, too, is wrought with absence, cannot speak and needs to be reconstructed. Moreover, the case has no tangible parts. It only exists insofar as Morse builds it.[1]
<4> To underscore the perhaps counterintuitive aspects of the genre, Plochocki reminds us that the detective is not always successful and occasionally stumbles onto the solution. In its post-modern metaphysical version, beginning with Poe, the detective story refuses to follow a linear path towards a predictable conclusion. Instead, it winds a polysemous and self-reflexive trail towards a provisional but plausible position. As Plochocki says of Colin Dexter’s Morse novels, "Dexter disrupts this progression by making the role of the reader, both inside and outside the novel, clearer and more explicit" (92). Ultimately, the combination of the detective’s misinterpretations and the uncertainty of any piece of knowledge undercuts not only the traditional trajectory of the genre, but also the underlying assumptions in reading it (203). Perhaps this is Plochocki’s most telling achievement. She has concretely made her case for rethinking detective fiction based on a careful study of that which cannot be reified. I hope I can be excuse for wishing that she had spent some time considering film or TV detectives instead of offering mere hints. Then again, that could be the next absence that inspires a substantial presence.
Work Cited
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Note
[1] I mention this only by way of footnote, but I could not help but think of one of Foucault’s conclusions in Discipline & Punish that the prison is not intended to eliminate offences but rather to but "to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them" (272). Similarly, the detective creates the case, categorizes it, disseminates it and uses it. Furthermore, given the focus on the body in Plochocki’s text and its centrality in Foucault’s, I must wonder how the French philosopher might have informed what is an already rich study. [^]
Marc A. Ouellette
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