When Crime Fiction Lives in Crime Fiction (Talk in St Hilda´s College Crime Fiction Weekend)

When crime fiction lives in crime fiction

Guillermo Martínez

Talk in St Hilda´s College Crime Fiction Weekend (August 14th, 2021)

In his essay “When fiction lives in fiction”, argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges points out some moments that we could call of “auto reference” in literature, in the sense of a logical loop in which fiction turns to itself. He mentions in first place that night in The Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherezade tells to the sultan her own story as a captive, triggering the possibility of an infinite cycle:

“No one as disturbing as the night 602, magic amongst the nights. In that strange night, the king hears from the queen´s mouth her own story. He receives the beggining of the story, which embodies all of the following and also -in a monsterous way- it includes itself. Could the reader clearly envision the vast possibility of this interpolation, its curious threat? Let the queen persist and the motionless king will hear forever the truncated story of The Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular…”

Borges comments then about the play set in the third act of Hamlet:

“Shakespeare builds a stage in the stage; the fact that the represented piece –the poisoning of a king- mirrors in some way the main play, is enough to suggest the possibility of infinite involutions.”

At this point he recalls a sharp observation by De Quincey, who points out that the “solid, overlined style of this minor piece makes the general drama, in contrast, more truthful.”

Also, in other essay, “Partial magics of the Quixote” (“Magias parciales del Quijote”), Borges reflects that “in the reality, each novel is an ideal plane; Cervantes likes to confuse the objective with the subjective, the world of the reader and the world of the book. […] In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the barber inspect Don Quixote´s library; amazingly, one of the examinated books is Cervantes novel The Galatea. This game of strange ambiguities culminates in the second part; the main characters have read the first part: the protagonists of the Quixote are at the same time, readers of the Quixote.”

Near the end of the article Borges asks himself:

“Why is it disturbing for us that Don Quixote becomes a reader of The Quixote and Hamlet, spectator of Hamlet? I think that I have discovered the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fiction can be readers or spectators, us, the readers or spectators, could be fictitous.”

In his celebrated short story, “The Aleph”, Borges, now as a fiction author, appeals to this same device, when, in the middle of the famous enumeration of images that the protagonist absorbs from that little sphere called Aleph, he says in passing “I saw your face”, abruptly involving the reader.

“[…] I saw the Aleph, from all the points, I saw in the Aleph the Earth, and in the Earth again the Aleph and in the Aleph the Earth, I saw my face and my viscera, I saw your face, and I had vertigo and I cried because my eyes had seen that secret, conjectural object, whose name usurp the men, but no men has looked at: the inconceivable universe.”

In this way, for a fleeting moment, the story pops up from the plane of fiction and sinks us, as readers, in the twirl of images -the enumeration of Everything- which neccesarily, if it is exhaustive, must include us.

With a similar procedure Julio Cortázar, in his short story “Continuity of the Parks” portraits a reader of a crime novel sitting in a couch of green velvet, which looks to a garden. Absort in reading, he does not realize that in the plot unfolding in front of his eyes, the murderer of the novel (the lover of a woman who wants to eliminate her husband) walks through a path of trees -following the “continuity of the parks”- reaches a garden identical to his own and enters with a knife in a sitting room, where a man is reading in a green velvet couch.

In this way Cortázar adds a new variant to the murder combinatory that seemed exhausted by Agatha Christie and shows that in a crime story even the reader can be the victim.

In all of these cases, the allusion of a fiction inside the fiction has the literary purpose of perforating the plane of fiction to an outer dimension, as an irruption in the world which we call “real” of something coming from that other world created in the pages, but, in principle, restricted and captive in them. If in reality, as Borges claims in his geommetrical analogy, each novel is an ideal plane, the autoreference is an attempt to emerge from that plane to the three dimensional space, as the imprisoned point in a circle still can escape by jumping “upwards”.

There are, nevertheless, at least three more possible reasons (or literary intentions) to bring a fiction inside a fiction. The first one is given in passing by Umberto Eco during an interview. He said there that in our prosaic contemporary time, devoided of the inflamated love rethoric which was accepted and even awaited in other times, a man cannot say a love line too “elevated” to a woman without making a fool of himself or being taken as an impostor. But he still can resort to a quotation, he can still play the little trick of evoking a verse of a poem, he can try the inverse path that goes from the “real” world to the wider and more permissive world of literature, where that exaggeration can be formulated, to bring it back to conversation in an amphibious movement.

That very same trick can be played in the crime novel. The crime novel in general requires to establish strict facts, like reliable cards at open sight, and proceeds with reasonings that must finally adjust themselves to the logic of the real, of the possible. This implies some tension in the language with everything that sounds too lyrical, or “spiritual”, or  fuzzy or exaggerated. The prose register of the crime novel does not easily admit poetical raptures. What prevails in general is certain dryness, that is related with the mass of information that goes along with the development of a case. This information, that has to be accurate, or accurately ambiguous, comprises forensic procedures, details of autopsies, of weapons and poisons, verification of alibies, schedules and time tables, legal subtleties and will conundrums,  and does not get along very well with lyrical enthusiasms. The pact of reading of the crime novel is not one of seduction –or the symmetric seduction by shocking of malditism- as in any other novel: it is a pact of the confrontation of minds.

Within that intrinsecal limitation of language, the resort to literary quotations allows, following Eco´s comment, the possibility to open a window for new air, to infuse beauty and reach, with luck, to other symbolisms or some literary height. This is what Agatha Christie attempts, for example, by inserting constant references to Shakespeare dramas in her novels, or her evocation of children rhymes of the English tradition. Also Raymond Chandler proceeds in this way, through characters that are sometimes readers, as Ricardo Piglia points out in his essay “The Last Reader”. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, turns around the proportion and puts books and the philosophical discussion in the center of the scene, as the heart of the intrigue. In any case, books, inside a crime novel, pave the way to an amplification of the language register via the device of quotation.

The second intention is related to De Quincey´s observation: the mention of a crime novel inside a crime novel can get, by an effect of contrast, more truth, life, plausibility to the world in the end also fictitious that is being narrated. Most frecuently the quotation or allusion has some touch of irony, of detachment, in the same way that a contemporary magician could show some illusion first performed with a naive trick by magicians in the past only to repeat it  for the second time with invisible and “true” magic.  This effect of truth projected by the mention of something that is bluntly in the side of the fictitious world, something already written, and converted into a book, and therefore accepted as “artifice”, reminds the effect of the crane-camera in cinema (as observed by Pablo Maurette in his recent book Why do we believe fiction stories?).

Indeed, the crane-camera, when taking distance and moving upwards to encompass more and more of what was being shown, could reveal the scenography, the cameras, the chair of the director, the fictitious nature of the world just represented (and this has been done in movies many times). But when it is chosen, on the contrary, the continuity of the fiction, the effect on the viewers is an increment, a reassurance, of the truth feeling. The world which was bounded to certain limits in the film, to a few characters, to certain neighborhood, is expanded in this continuity, becomes vaster and vaster, still “real”, without flaws, as far as the eyes can reach, and fades in this new illusion with our “real” world. In a similar way, the discussion of a crime novel in a crime novel enlarges “outwards” the world of the novel, to allow the access of objects coming from the “real” world, and melting the frontiers between fiction and reality.

The third way in which crime fiction lives in crime fiction is through the recreation or variation of a plot or a clever deceit. Since the combinatory of a certain number of crimes and certain number of suspects is always finite, the crime novel, by the simple incessant accumulation of titles, is bounded to the eternal return of deliberate or unconscious similarities. I remember that the first idea I had for my novel The Oxford Murders was in fact a variation of Chesterton´s riddle in his short story “The Sign of the Broken Sword”. In that story there is a question repeated as a ritornello: Where does a wise man hide a pebble? On the beach. Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.

Maybe you remember that from this idea, in Chesterton´s story a colonel unleashes a cruel battle just to hide a private crime in the heap of bodies of dead soldiers in the battle field, behind that crowded crime that is war.

As a variation of this idea I thought: how do you hide a crime just commited, in present time, with the police in the way? My variation was to immerse it in a series of crimes to happen. To disguise it as the first term of a falsified series. To hide it in the future, as a part of a sufficiently convincing conjecture.

I included in my novel a reference to this story by Chesterton, as a way to acknowledge that first association, but, since the deceit starts a false series, it was inevitable that the critics and the readers also related The Oxford Murders with other classical stories around this motif: the short story “The Death and the Compass”, by Borges, and the novel The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie.

Also, in my recent novel The Oxford Brotherhood, there are many allusions to crime novels. In the beggining, a young student is hit by a car, and there is an echo here of The Beast Must Die, by Nicholas Blake. Blake´s novel inaugurated a very famous collection of crime novels in Argentina, called The Seventh Circle, directed in its early stages by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. In some sense, the always provisional visa of literary approval that the crime genre has in Argentina is due to this prestigious collection.

Later in my novel, a poison called “aconitine” shows up, and there is a reference to The Crime of Lord Arthur Savile, by Oscar Wilde, and even a search of that book in book stores and the outloud reading of a paragraph from it. Also, part of the resolution of the crime is related to a discussion of a variant of another short story by Chesterton, “The Three Horsemen of Apocalypsis”, around the question of when it is absurd and when it is not to “kill the messenger”.  I also briefly mention another nouvelle that I read when I was a teenager, that deeply impressed me: If I Die Before I Wake, by William Irish; and a sardonic line of another novel by Nicholas Blake, in which a parrot repeats: Poison is a woman´s weapon, poison is a woman´s weapon!

Besides these three literary intentions, that I tried to display up to this point, there is also sometimes an unexpected reading effect on the book that was borrowed for that ephimerous life, of just a few quotes, inside some other fiction. When I inserted the first mentions to Alice in Wonderland inside my novel The Oxford Brotherhood –which spins around Lewis Carroll biography-  I hadn´t imagine yet the possibility of pairing the deaths that would occur later in the plot with some threatening scenes spread in Wonderland. But once I took that decision, at a certain point in the novel, the inspector in charge has to read again that book of his childhood –supposedly childish- from this sinister point of view, to find hints of possible ways of dying. I put in him my own surprise when I found in this peculiar search a book much darker than what I remembered.

It also happened to me, and I will finish with this, that when The Oxford Brotherhood was published in Spain, a lady of a reading club approached me quite angrily and said to me that after reading my novel –where she learnt for the first time about the rumours of pedophilia surrounding Carroll- she would never be able to read Alice in Wonderland again in the same way.

I recognize that I didn´t know what to say: through my fiction, no doubt, something of the ambiguous human being that was Lewis Carroll had jumped out, something of his darkness had emerged, enough to contamminate what had been a limpid and happy reading of her childhood, that she believed untouchable. I felt like a messenger that delivers a poisoned envelope, one you better kill before he knocks the door.

REFERENCES

BORGES, Jorge Luis; “Cuando la ficción vive en la ficción”, Textos Cautivos (Segunda parte), Borges Obras Completas, vol. 14, Sudamericana, 1986.

BORGES, Jorge Luis; “Magias parciales del Quijote”, Otras inquisiciones, 1952, Borges Obras Completas, vol. 6, Sudamericana, 1986.

BORGES, Jorge Luis; “El Aleph”, in El Aleph, 1949, Borges Obras Completas, vol. 5, Sudamericana, 1986.