Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories

Style, Fall, 1995 by Gregory Forter

The eye of this style can thus "pull back" or "cut" all it wants to. It can give us belatedly the establishing shots that it at first withholds, can even try to produce a knowledge through narrational ordering of its elements. It continues, nevertheless, to enunciate with a staid and myopic parsimony. The world from its vantage is a two-dimensional affair that does not speak, a universe composed of empty clues and broken circuits, where accident has effectively absorbed essence and meaning is no more than the spartan byproduct of a predominantly material sign. All that this style can manage to do is reveal its object as an illegible blot. It decomposes the thing it discloses, breaks the world up in objectal fragments that have no essentially meaningful relation, so that in the light of its "objectivity" that world emerges only stupidly - darkly - obscenely: as an evanescent yet sticky materiality that gives rise to an interpretive recalcitrance precisely inasmuch as it is apprehended "straight."(6) Only when the text "distorts" that world with narrative, smearing it retroactively with the telos of a hermeneutical desire, does it manage to remand its objects into the custody of meaning. Narrative acts here as a fantasy structure transforming the inert signs of the desire for nothing into the meaningful objects of a desire for something. It takes the voided solidity of the world and literally rediscloses it to us, dressing it up in the significant promise of a narrational and redemptive causality. If the primary function of the detective is thus to link the world's objects by way of this causality, that function remains profoundly at odds with a style that clings to its empty secret long after the narrative secretes. That style, marshaling a logic of the missed encounter, orchestrates an impossible confrontation with a real that it always yet misses, that we can never know as such, but that it coaxes to erupt into discourse as a non-integratable objectal obscenity eroding the intentional significance of the hermeneutical code. Reading becomes a kind of trauma, interpretation a matter of unauthorized inference. The pleasure of the hard-boiled text is bound up with the pain of an interpretive dissatisfaction.

But such a pain is just part of the story. Beyond these significatory erosions and depletions, the "objectivity" of this style also entails an ontological erasure, as it refuses to open a space for interiority, affectivity - in short, for humanity itself. What makes that style above all so ghostly is its evacuation of human agency from the site of the human being, and the consequent investment of such agency in inanimate objects and the forces of nature:

Wind-driven rain hammered tree, bush, ground, man, car with incessant blows. . . .

Wind and rain on [the man's] back pushed him downhill towards the [light]. . . . though he stumbled often and staggered, and was tripped by obstacles underfoot, he kept his feet under him and moved nimbly enough, if erratically, towards his goal.