Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by Marilyn C. Wesley

"One should try to locate power at the extreme points of its exercise," according to Michel Foucault, "where it is always less legal in character," where it is "completely invested in its real and effective practices" ("Two Lectures" 97). Novels of detection, which investigate extreme instances of extra-legal violence, may, therefore, be understood as pertinent inquiries into the practical operation of power. And crime fiction, contemporary critics argue, is a particularly apt medium for the negotiation of racial inequities. [1] Walter Mosley's adaptation of the hard-boiled genre in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first volume in his Easy Rawlins mystery series, stages an examination of the new possibilities for black empowerment in the aftermath of the Second World War. [2]

Originating in the 1920s, the American hard-boiled detective story is similar to its classic British counterpart in organization, but dissimilar in content. It begins with the introduction of the detective, then sets him into action in pursuit of a mystery which turns into a crime, trails him through a convoluted investigation, and concludes with the solution of the crime. The differences derive from setting--the corrupt underworld of the modern city instead of the potentially pastoral British country house. In place of imposing rational discovery, the hard-boiled hero experiences bewildering initiation into the violence just under an urbane surface. Unlike the cool and remote classic detective, the hard-boiled variant is understandably human in his confusions and disappointments, and he substitutes simple toughness and temerity for esoteric methods of logical reasoning in order to fashion an ad hoc morality out of the lost ethics of an impure world. The system of justice he encounters is damaged but not bey ond repair. And it is his job somehow to mend it. [3]

The essence of both the classic and hard-boiled detective story is the pursuit of knowledge, and the source of that knowledge is the violence that threatens civil order. The difference between the white hard-boiled detective and Mosley's black detective is to be found in the ends which that knowledge serves. Despite his cynicism, a character like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe is a servant of the dominant system of law and order. But Mosley's Easy Rawlins needs to learn how the operation of that system in the post-war era affects the power of the black man to survive and prosper. This lesson takes shape through a series of mentors who teach him about the levels and types of violent power, and finally leads him to the enigmatic woman whose mystery abrogates the conventional categories of his experience. His process of detection does not result in a unitary moral code; instead, the acts of violence he encounters call for a confusing variety of ethical responses. Through the adventures and the ambivalence of the black detective, Devil in a Blue Dress and subsequent works in the Rawlins series enact a Foucauldian structure which teaches that power, like law, is not an order to be retrieved but the contingent result of specific circumstances that black men may understand through violence and adapt to their own needs for respect and freedom.

If, as the saying goes, "Knowledge is power," it makes sense that the race and class in charge have sought to curtail its access. The restriction of black knowledge is historically evident, from laws against teaching slaves to read to contemporary inequities in support for education in predominantly black neighborhoods. The violation of this restriction is certainly one of the major appeals of the black detective novel. The classic detective, like Sherlock Holmes, an agent of the aristocracy, puts his highly specialized knowledge to use solving lurid crimes in a manner that protects the dominant class from the threat of or responsibility for violence. By defining criminal activity as deviation, his solutions demarcate knowledge as separate from violent power. But the later hard-boiled detective, like Philip Marlowe, seeks rather than possesses knowledge, which emerges from his informed participation in the violence that surrounds him. It is this characteristic connection between knowledge and power mediated by the narrative of detection that makes it so useful in the serious attempt to define these prerogatives for black manhood and which revises the meaning and source of black knowledge in Devil in a Blue Dress.

In his seminal 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass recounted several key means of reclaiming the manhood denied by the institution of slavery: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall now see how a slave was made a man" (294). The ability to earn a wage and the participation in a supportive fraternal community are significant elements in this reversal, but even more important are Douglass's achievement of literacy and the physical defense of his own rights in a fight with an overseer. [4] This conjunction of knowledge and force comes to fruition for Douglass in his career as an abolitionist spokesman. In Fighting for Life, Walter J. Ong traces the historical roots of "the alliance between masculinity" and a combative academic style (140) in a rhetorical practice of education based on the exclusionary exercise of masculine competition: "What was taught...was to take a stand in favor of a thesis or to attack a thesis that someone else defended." Students "learned subjects largely by fighting ove r them" (122-23). Douglass, who was deeply influenced by his early discovery of the ideational confrontations structuring the debate about slavery in The Columbian Orator, excelled in an age when public information, like education itself, was delivered in the form of verbal combat. For him the acquisition of knowledge and the assertion of masculine force were conjoined parts of the same racial struggle [5]