Action and Consequence: The Psychology of Detective Stories

Action and Consequence: The Psychology of Detective Stories, by Keith Oatley and Jennifer Jenkins, is written as a novel, to ask: “Why do we like reading or watching stories of this kind? The book is itself a detective story moving to find an answer to this question.

Murder isn’t just about killing someone; cancer can do that. Rather, as one of the world’s best detective story writers, P.D. James, said: “it tears a jagged hole in society.” A detective works away to discover this hole and repair it, helping us all to live with each other.

Chapters in Action and Consequence are “Disorder, Clues, Plot, Character, Relationship, Context, Motive, Conviction.”

In Chapter 1, a detective tries to solve the mystery of a murder on a cruise ship in Sweden. In Chapter 2, come Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr John Watson, then in the next Chapter, Watson takes Holmes for therapy with Sigmund Freud. Later, we move via Russell Williams, a high-up pilot in charge of Canada’s largest air-base, who stole people’s knickers then raped and murdered two women. Then via Lucy Letby, a nurse who seems to have murdered infants in a hospital, we end with a story told by the first female judge at the highest criminal court, the Old Bailey, in London, England.

Although, much more modern, detective stories can be thought of as coming to stand alongside talks that one can hear in churches, synagogues, and mosques, inviting us to reflect upon differences between good and bad, and inferences we might make about people we know, as well as our selves.

Research Bulletin: Reading and Student Stress

Mental health is a pressing concern for university students, with increasing numbers of students seeking mental health services in recent years. Dr. Shelby Levine and colleagues (2020) investigated whether recreational reading could improve the mental health of students by helping them fulfill core psychological needs. They hypothesized that recreational reading could decrease feelings of isolation and low competence, and serve as a form of resistance against restrictive academic environments.
At the beginning of the academic year, 201 college students reported their psychological distress, recreational reading goals, and autonomous motivation to read (i.e., of their own volition). At the end of the year, psychological distress and recreational reading achievements were measured again. The researchers discovered that psychological distress was much greater in all students at the end of the year. However, those who read more books had a smaller increase in distress than those who had read less. Further, autonomous motivation to read predicted a more ambitious reading goal, as well as more books completed by the end of the year. Lastly, the more books students read, the less frustrated they felt in terms of core needs, which led to less distress.
The authors conclude that fostering an intrinsic love of recreational reading in children and youth should be a key goal for parents and teachers. Based on their findings, promoting and supporting a love for reading could be an effective way to help students cope with the stressors of university.

Post by Shyamaly Vasuthevan

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).
 
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels. 

Our Souls At Night

The idea of “schema” was central to Frederic Bartlett’s book of 1932, Remembering, where he described a series of experiments in which people were asked to read a story, or to look at a picture, and then reproduce it either immediately or later. Bartlett’s proposal was that remembering is an activity based not on anything like a photograph or recording, but on an understanding—schema—of how, in a way that is familiar to a person and within a society, one does certain kinds of actions like getting onto a train, or sitting down with others for a meal, plus an emotional attitude together with a rather small amount of detail. In Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich (1960) took this idea into an understanding of representational painting which, he said, is based on schema plus correction: for instance, a general idea of what a mountain, or a house, or a person might look like, together with a correction so that it becomes more specific or, in the case of some paintings, new and surprising. 

 

Kent Haruf’s novel of 2015, Our Souls at Night is also based on a schema: our idea of what it is for two people to have an affair. In the first chapter of the book, we are introduced to the novel’s protagonist, the elderly widow, Addie Moore, who lives in a small town in Colorado. She walks over to the house, one block away, of another elderly person: a widower, Louis Waters, whom she knows a little bit but not at all well.  Invited in, she tells him that she won’t stay long, then says that she is getting cold feet. She then says this.

 

I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me… I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.

 

The usual schema we might have of going to bed with someone, or having an affair, receives a correction. Addie says to Louis that she means what she says. “I’m not talking about sex" she says but "lying warm in bed, companionably.”

 

At first, Louis makes his visits late in the evening, when he is unlikely to be seen. Addie and he try to keep their arrangement secret. As they talk with each other about their marriages, their concerns, they find themselves becoming closer. One event which Addie recounted had been especially hard. Her five-year old daughter, Connie, had been playing in the back yard with her elder brother, Gene, and had run out into the street, had been hit by a car and died. The event had been devastating for Addie’s marriage and devastating for Gene. Addie became the target of both her husband’s and her son’s resentments.

 

Other people in the town start to notice Addie’s and Louis’s relationship and to talk about it; no longer a secret. The turning point of the novel occurs when Gene asks Addie to look after his young son, Jamie, for a while, because his wife has left him. Jamie is a rather neglected child, but Louis takes to him, looks after him as a parent might, buys him a dog, of which the boy becomes fond. 

 

What are your schemas for growing older, for families, for parental relationships, for affairs? 

 

What happens next in this novel? Do Addie and Louis get round to sex? What might Jamie think of what is going on? Maybe I should tell you. Maybe we should gossip. What do you think?

 

Frederic Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Ernst Gombrich (1960). Art and illusion. Phaidon.

Kent Haruf (2015). Our souls at night. Knopf.

 

 

 

 

  

Klara and the future of humanity

In his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro reaches beyond what occurs in most fiction. This novel’s protagonist, Klara, is a robot. Whereas some people have wondered whether robots will, like humans, become selfish and try to take over the Earth, here the question is different. Klara is an AF: Artificial Friend. The question is of what it is to be human, what it is to be a friend, what it is to love someone. 

 

Klara looks like a human being, but she is powered by the rays of Sun, in which—or whom—she has a deeply religious belief. The person to whom Klara becomes a friend, is Josie, a teenager who lives with her Mother. After her morning cup of coffee Mother (capital M) goes off to work each day, leaving Josie with her Artificial Friend. Klara is intelligent, very observant (a pleasure of this novel is reading Klara’s patterns of thought) and comes to love her, to know her as if from the inside. In the first part of the novel, Josie seems to manage alright, but she then becomes more and more sick. 

 

Among the humans who appear as characters in this story, one of the questions is which ones have been “lifted.” We don’t come across that concept until well into the book (page 70 on my Kindle version). We are never told, here, what “lifted” means. My inference is that it means that, when they were children, some of the human characters have been genetically engineered to raise their intelligence. This predisposes some of them to look down on others who have not received this modification. But perhaps their piece of genetic engineering also makes some of them more vulnerable, liable to become sick.

 

So, alongside the issue of whether robots, made on the basis of artificial intelligence, will accompany human beings on this planet—and with what motives—there comes a newer question. It is that of whether we humans can have our own abilities supplemented by means of receiving genetic changes. A biography and discussion of this issue has also come out this year. By Walter Isaacson, it’s called The Code Breaker: Jennifer Daudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. Daudna, the protagonist of this story, is the principal pioneer of genetic engineering.

 

A central theme in Klara and the Sun, is whether, perhaps, if Josie dies, a physical model that is being made of her by a man who is a sort of portrait-sculptor, might be inhabited by Klara. The idea is that then, with the very extensive understanding of her that Klara has acquired, the processing parts of the Artificial Friend might be inserted into this physical model so that she might reproduce Josie’s movements, her facial expressions, her thoughts, and her words. In this way perhaps other people might not be able to tell the difference between this artificial Josie and the one who might die. All other people? Including her Mother? Or would something necessarily be left out? And if so what might that be?

 

Kazuo Ishiguro (2021). Klara and the Sun. Toronto: Knopf.   

 

Walter Isaacson (2021). The code breaker: Jennifer Doudna, gene editing, and the future of the human race. New York: Simon & Schuster.

The Soul of Kindness

Elizabeth Taylor, born in 1912, was one of the most accomplished English novelists of the Twentieth Century. She can be thought of continuing in the way pioneered by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf of depicting people’s inner lives but extending this to include several characters’ thoughts in relating and conversing with a set of other people who include relatives, friends, and lovers. She published twelve novels, a children’s book, and many short stories, which she conceived and thought about while bringing up two children. She was outraged by the fact that most male writers have not needed to divide their time in this way. So here, from her A View of the Harbour (1947) is Beth, a novelist on her way up to London on a train to see her publisher. "A man, she thought suddenly, would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, not leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I have now forgotten it" (p. 186). 

 

Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness (1964) can be regarded as a variation on Jane Austen’s Emma, in which the protagonist encourages others to marry. Elizabeth Taylor's novel starts with the wedding of Flora Secretan to Richard, a businessman. In the early part of the book Flora influences her best friend Meg to yearn for a sexual relationship with Patrick, a novelist, without seeming to know that, although he is willing to take Meg out for an occasional meal, it won’t go much further because he is gay. She also influences Richard’s father to marry his mistress, Ba; they do so and both find their lives much more boring than they had previously been. Meg’s brother, Kit, adores Flora and thinks of her as a goddess. He has been to drama school and has had one or two tiny walk-on parts. Although no one else thinks he has the slightest chance, Flora encourages him to believe that he will triumph and become a great actor. In Chapter 2, (p. 14 in the Kindle version) we read this: “she had inconvenient plans for other people’s pleasure, and ideas differing from her own she was not able to tolerate.” Then here, at the end of Chapter 2, are Flora and her new husband, Richard, in bed.

She was glad that there was a way of coaxing him out of his black humour. She turned him to face her, her silky arms around his shoulders. An end to the sulks. Benignly, she made a present of herself.

Flora … the soul of kindness.

 

Flora’s friend, Meg, works in an office in the middle of London but cannot afford to live in Kensington. So, with a small amount of money inherited from her father and some encouragement from Patrick, she moves into a little house that allows an occasional distant glimpse of the funnel of a ship passing on the river in an area that seems to be somewhere between Greenwich and Woolwich. Near this house lives Liz whose studio is upstairs from a deserted shop that is scheduled for demolition. Liz lives in the most awful mess: dead flowers, cow parsley, some feathers, dinner plates, sea-shells, all over the floor. But she paints pictures:

The rubbish on the floor and about the room had been re-created, reassembled over and over again, into delicate and intricate patterns … there were also some pale girl children, with staring eyes (p. 39).

 

The artistic arrangements are beautiful. It doesn’t seem to be an accident that the painter is called “Liz,” because here is a quote from the end of the Wikipedia article on Elizabeth:

The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.

 

I don’t think The Soul of Kindness is quite perfect, but it seems to me that aspects of it are. It does have a plot, but that’s not really what it’s about. It is a book that one needs to read slowly; it’s unlikely to work if you skip or speed-read. It depicts characters’ thoughts, then thoughts of what they might or might not say, maybe could say or should say … but instead they say something else which is sometimes a cliché, which isn’t quite what they meant to say but, because it’s been heard before, could possibly be alright. People’s beliefs and ideas about each other and about themselves also get passed around. At this book’s centre is the issue that although we human beings are completely dependent on our relationships, we often don’t quite know, and some of us seem unable to know, what effects we might have by saying certain things to others.

 

In this novel, too, are observations: as characters look at gardens and shops and houses. What they see, mingled with their thoughts of what they might say, is a multitude of English peculiarities. The result for the reader (at least this one) was quite a bit of giggling out-loud as I proceeded. In this book as well—rather touchingly depicted—there’s loneliness, particularly for Flora’s mother and for Flora’s friend, Meg.

 

The book’s principal focus is on self-absorption. Although, in Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), there’s affection, there’s not much of it in The Soul of Kindness. Instead there’s reflection … prompted by the question of what we human beings are up to in our lives, and on how we search for meaning within ourselves and with each other.

 

Jane Austen (1816). Emma. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 2003).

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1947). A view of the harbour. New York: New York Review Books (current edition 2015). 

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1964). The soul of kindness. London: Virago (current edition 2010).

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1971). Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. London: Virago (current edition 1982).

 

 

 

Reflection

 

Mollie Panter-Downes became well known for her column in the New Yorker on life in London during World War II (republished as London War Notes). Her fifth novel, One Fine Day, came out in 1947. Its title might have been One Day, because that’s what it is: a day in the life of a family who live in an aging house, somewhere south-west of London, one year after the end of the War. 

 

Here's the plot. Eight o’clock in the morning, the sun is shining. Laura and Stephen Marshall at breakfast. Stephen leaves the house, drives to the station to go up on the train to London, where he works. Their twelve-year old daughter Victoria goes to school. Laura, age 38, the main protagonist, goes on a bus to do some shopping in a nearby town. Provisions in short supply, coupons needed. She returns; does some stuff around the house, and in the garden, then in the afternoon rides on her bicycle to collect the family dog who has wandered off. Having collected him from where he sometimes goes, to a gypsy who lives with several dogs in an abandoned railway carriage, she climbs a small hill, and looks out over the countryside. She lies on the grass, falls asleep, with the dog on a lead beside her. It’s early evening when Victoria returns, having had tea with her friend Mouse Watson. Her mother isn’t home. Later, Stephen comes back from work. Laura still not home. Victoria finds some fish and cooks it. She and her father eat it for dinner. Both of them worried. Where can she be? Laura is woken by a noise. It’s a hiker whom she’d seen on the bus that morning. She sees how late it is; thinks of something she was going to tell her husband but can’t remember what. Thinks she’d better hurry home. That’s it. 

 

The middle of the novel is taken up with episodes, Laura’s meetings with people such as a working class family one of whom, George, is extraordinarily handsome, and might be able to do a bit of gardening but can’t because he’s going off elsewhere, and the Vicar, “a saint who had the misfortune to sound like a bore.” Incidents occur. And memories: Laura remembers a man she might have married but feels relieved that she did not. She sees huts that Canadian soldiers had lived in, sees holes in a wall where army trucks had bashed through. She has thoughts about this house and that one. It’s hard to imagine anything more redolent—I think that’s the word—of South-of-England upper-middle-class life in the aftermath of World War II. One could re-arrange some of the episodes and meetings without making much difference, because the sequence—morning, afternoon, evening—is not what this novel is about. At a deeper level it’s reflection: by Mollie, by Laura (with smaller pieces by Victoria and Stephen), and by us readers, on what it is to be human, on what our relationships within ourselves and with each other are all about.

 

For me the novel succeeded in prompting reflection, but with some parts that didn’t quite work. And it is so very, very, English. But the inwardness did work, somewhat like Virginia Woolf, but warmer, more interpersonal.

 

In his obituary of Mollie Panter-Downes, in the third of February 1997 issue of The Independent, Anthony Bailey reported her as saying, "I'm a reporter. I can't invent." What she was doing however was something that poets of the Tang Era in China did. Not invention, but perception of episodes in the world that are reflected in inner consciousness and writing (see OnFiction: “Patterns in the World and in the Mind,’ 9 January 2012; you can reach it by doing a search for “Tang” on the OnFiction home page). In Mollie Panter-Downes’s case, although some of her world is to do with nature, predominately it’s people.

 

Panter-Downes, M. (1947). One fine day. Current edition: London: Virago, 1985).

Panter-Downes, M. (2004). London war notes. London: Persephone.

 

Eleanor Oliphant

Gail Honeyman said that the idea for her first novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, came from two sources. One was reading an article about a woman in her twenties who lived alone in a big city. She would leave work on Friday and would often not speak to anyone until she returned to work on Monday. The other was how someone might manage if they were conversationally awkward. Eleanor Oliphant’s work and home life are similar to those of the woman in her twenties. And she is not just conversationally awkward but often inappropriate, sometimes rude. 

 

Eleanor was hired by Bob to work in the accounts office of a graphic design company in Glasgow. She has been there for nine years. She is clever and did a degree in classics. She gets the Daily Telegraph, not because she likes the newspaper but to do its cryptic crossword. She thinks she isn’t liked by the others who work in her office, which is probably right, because she can’t do small talk. At weekends she drinks vodka, so that Saturday and Sunday pass in a bit of a haze. 

 

On television one evening, she sees Johnnie, a musician. Immediately, she falls in love with him, because she can see from the three-piece suit that he wears and the way that he leaves undone the bottom button of his waistcoat, that he is a gentleman. He’s the one for her. He’s a musician and she knows that the moment they meet he will fall in love with her. She starts to make preparations to make herself look more beautiful. 

 

Every Wednesday evening, Mummy gets in touch. In Chapter 4, Eleanor thinks that it was hardly surprising that her mother had been institutionalized, given the nature of her crime. During these conversations, Mummy is scathing and horrible but Eleanor tells her about this chap she is thinking of, and Mummy is encouraging. 

 

In her office, Eleanor’s computer malfunctions. She gets in touch with Raymond, a new bloke who has come to work in IT. He fixes the computer. Eleanor observes that he has scruffy hair, and a bit of a paunch. He wears running shoes, and silly t-shirts. He shaves infrequently and looks unkempt. Not only that but he smokes cigarettes. 

 

“How disgusting,” says Eleanor. “The chemical constitution of cigarettes includes cyanide and ammonia. Do you really want to willingly ingest such toxic substances?”

 

Eleanor receives a visit from a social worker. This occurs every six months. She was in foster care from the age of ten. She lived with several families and didn’t get along with any of them. Because of her background she has been housed in a low-rent flat. This time the social worker is new; during her visit, as she flicks through her file on Eleanor, a look of shock comes over her. 

 

One day, although they have only just met, Eleanor and Raymond find themselves leaving work at the same time. As they walk along, they see an elderly man staggering, then falling down in the street. Raymond goes to help him and gets Eleanor to do so as well. Although reluctant, she does. They call an ambulance, and the man is taken to hospital. They find themselves making visits to the old man in hospital. His name is Sammy. He tells them they saved his life. Just before they leave, one day, he takes Eleanor’s hands in his. This feels to her very warm and cozy.

 

Although love is the most popular topic in stories from all round the world—love of the sexual kind—this story is not about that. It’s not a love story, it’s a friend story. 

 

In Chapter 10, Raymond has invited Eleanor to go with him to visit his Mum, which he does nearly every Sunday. It involves Raymond going around his Mum’s house and doing everything that needs doing. She has terrible arthritis, but she keeps everything clean and neat, and is able to look after the vegetable garden in the backyard. Eleanor is asked to stay for tea, which she does. It’s soup with stock and vegetables from the garden. Lovely. Afterwards Raymond says he’ll do the washing up. Noticing Eleanor’s hands have eczema, he says that he would wash and she could dry. At one point, conversation among Raymond, his Mum, and Eleanor, turns towards Raymond’s dad, and how he lived long enough to see his daughter get married. Eleanor wonders why Raymond had not mentioned that he has a sister.  His Mum asks her if she has any brothers or sisters. She says she hasn’t. She says that this is a source of sadness for her, and bursts into tears. Apologies all round. She says she never knew her father, and that she talks to her Mummy once a week. It all seems perfectly ordinary … it IS perfectly ordinary, except this is the first time that Eleanor has ever talked about herself to anybody.

 

The novel also has an aspect of mystery. We wonder what happened to Eleanor, what had shocked the social worker, what the Wednesday evening conversations with Mummy are really about. We ask ourselves why Eleanor burst into tears when asked about a sibling. 

 

Towards the end of the novel, Raymond says this: “I remember when I first met you … I thought you were a right nutter.”

 

“I am a right nutter,” she says.

 

Then Raymond says: “Aye, sure you’re a bit bonkers—but in a nice way.” 

 

And maybe that’s a bit like some of the rest of us.

Gail Honeyman (2017). Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. Toronto: Viking. 

Clarice Lispector

The novella, The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, is unlike anything else I have read. This review can be thought of as following on from my previous post about authors hearing the voices of their characters, and characters having independent agency. It’s about the lives of someone called Rodrigo, an author-narrator who starts by thinking of writing a book (the one you would have in your hands as you read The Hour of the Star) and the book’s protagonist, Macabéa, a nineteen-year-old woman, who is thin and not good-looking, who grew up a very poor area in the north-east of Brazil, who had only three years at school, then moved to Rio de Janeiro to be employed as a typist.

Clarise Lispector was born in 1920, in the Ukraine, and her family moved to this same area in the north-east of Brazil, before moving to Rio de Janeiro.

In the story Macabéa meets the arrogant Olímpico, with whom she falls in love. On page 38, the author-narrator says of him: “He had, I just discovered, inside of him, the hard seed of evil.” Later we read that he had killed someone in the north-east of Brazil, and that he was also a thief. A few pages later we read that when walking along with Macabéa, Olímpico says he is strong, so he lifts her into the air. She is euphoric: “what it’s like to fly in an aeroplane” she thinks. Then he dumps her in the mud. Then, another few pages on, Olímpico says to her: “are you just pretending to be an idiot or are you actually an idiot?” Macobéa: “I’m not sure what I am, I think I’m a little … what? … “I mean I’m not quite sure what I am.”

Then Olímpico goes off with Glória, a blond chubby girl who works in the same office as Macabéa. Feeling guilty, Glória recommends that Macabéa should visit a fortune teller, Madame Carlota, who sees in Macabéa’s cards that her life has been and continues to be horrible. Then she relents and tells her client that her life will be wonderful, that she will be courted and marry someone called Hans. Macabéa is enchanted. As she leaves the fortune teller’s place, and steps off the pavement, she is run over and killed by a large and expensive Mercedes.

As Colm Tóibín wrote in a very engaging review: 

In October 1977, shortly before her death, she [Lispector] published the novella The Hour of the Star in which all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded in a densely self-conscious narrative dealing with the difficulty and odd pleasures of storytelling and then proceeding, when it could, to tell the story of Macabéa, a woman who, Lispector told an interviewer, "was so poor that all she ate were hot dogs". But she made clear that this was "not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery." [Then], Lispector told a TV interviewer: "I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me, and on the way home in the taxi I thought it'd be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things.”

But this novella isn’t about the plot. It’s about how Lispector the writer, created Rodrigo, the author-narrator, who created Macabéa as a character, and how this character in turn seems to take part in the process of creating not just author-narrator Rodrigo but also, perhaps, in a certain kind of way, Lispector. 

If we knew that that someone had decided to enter the police, or to be shop assistant or office worker, we might think that she or he had taken a decision, to become a person of a certain kind and that, in turn, the role she or he has taken on would shape something in that person. But an original idea of this novella, is that a somewhat similar process can occur with a writer and the story and characters that the writer decides to create. As we read on page 13 the author-narrator says: 

I have a fidgety character on my hands who escapes me at every turn expecting me to retrieve her … I see that north-eastern girl looking in the mirror and—a ruffle of the drum—in the mirror appears my weary and unshaven face. We’re that interchangeable.

Then on page 61 the author-narrator says to his readers:

As for me I’m tired. Maybe of the company of Macabéa, Glória, Olímpico… I have to interrupt this story for about three days … For the last three days, alone, without characters, I depersonalize myself … as if taking off my clothes … and now I emerge and miss Macabéa. Let’s continue.

But this novella is not just about this fascinating conversation among the writer, the author-narrator, the characters, and ourselves as readers. It’s a meditation on the nature of human life. It’s about how much we understand about others or understand about ourselves.

Clarice Lispector (2011). The hour of the star (second edition, with introduction by Colm Tóibín) (B. Moser, Trans.). New York: New Directions.

Colm Tóibín (2014) Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star is as bewildering as it is brilliant. The Guardian, 18 January.

The Wire

In OnFiction’s series of television series, we ought perhaps to have started with the series that really started it all: “The Wire.” It was conceived by David Simon, began in 2002, and ran for five seasons. Simon had worked for several years as a journalist on the newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, researching and writing about Baltimore’s police. Although he pitched “The Wire” to Home Box Office (HBO) as a cop show, as Margaret Talbot explains in her New Yorker article, “Stealing Life,” Simon said he thought about it as like a novel, in which each episode would be a chapter. A season would involve the development of character, an overall plot, perhaps with some digressions. 

One focus of “The Wire,” set in Baltimore, is on organizations in which not only do misunderstandings occur, but mistakes are made. Here the police are mirrored by a local drug gang. In both, higher-ups administer and sometimes take advantage of their positions. But, in these organizations, comradeship occurs. In this way, as police detectives, there are Bunk and his friend McNulty (seen in this image). Then one step up, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, who gains a growing respect. Then further steps up, people with more power and less respect. In the drug gang’s organization, there’s a comparable hierarchy. The first season’s plot is the contest between these two organizations. 

Near the beginning of the first episode of the first season we are in a courtroom, where a man at the gang’s mid-level, D’Angelo, is accused of having shot and killed someone (an underling drug-dealer in the gang). A witness changes testimony and D’Angelo is acquitted. Because getting him off had cost the gang time and money, he is demoted. The person who administers this is Stringer Bell, the gang’s organization person. Above him is the leader, Avon Barksdale (a companion of sorts to Bell). Both of them are very careful to avoid being seen or known by anyone in the police. (Although the gang’s business is of selling drugs, neither of these two, of course, ever indulges.) 

The title of the series refers to the police’s wire-tapping into telephone conversations among members of the drug-dealing gang. As Margaret Talbot points out, there’s also the implication that, as we watch, we are also tapping into the lives of these two groups of people. One effect, for viewers, is a growing understanding and empathy for some of the principal characters in both the police and the gang.

Most of the people on the show are black. This is another focus, with the issue of how problematic it can be to live in working-class American cities: one of the preoccupations of the principal author, David Simon. 

Several groups of immigrants—Irish, Italian, Jewish—included people who, finding life in the New World at first very difficult, took part in illegal activities. They aspired to make enough money so that their children could go to college and lead middle-class lives. Because of institutionalized prejudice, this kind of issue has been far more problematic for black people, whose ancestors did not immigrate: they were transported. (How’s that for illegality?) In this show, in Episode 8, of the first season, entitled “The Lesson,” we see Stringer Bell taking a class in economics.

 “The Wire” enabled television series-watching to be taken seriously, in the way that reading novels and watching certain kinds of films have become. And, as I wrote in OnFiction’s first review of television series (24 March 2020): “As Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) have shown … a prize-winning television series can have the same kinds of effects as reading fiction in enabling people to increase their empathy and understanding of others.”

Jessica Black & Jennifer Barnes (2015). Fiction and social cognition: The effect of viewing award-winning television dramas on theory of mind. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9, 423-429.

Margaret Talbot “Stealing Life,” The New Yorker, 15 October 2007.

Offspring

In these weeks of self isolation and social distancing with the corona virus pandemic what one may like, in the late evening, is a television series to watch before one goes to bed. Dating from 2002, when HBO (Home Box Office) an American television network started to broadcast The Wire, such series started, it seems, to have moved from soap operas to dramas that are more like novels, some with artistic features. Perhaps, indeed now, the television series released in episodes, in something like the way that novels used to be published in the nineteenth century, has become the print-novel’s newly embodied follow-up. As Jessica Black and Jennifer Barnes (2015) have shown, moreover, watching a prize-winning television series, can have the same kinds of effects as reading fiction in enabling people to increase their empathy and understanding of others (theory of mind). 

So this week, and for some weeks to follow, I’ll offer suggestions with mini-reviews of some series that seem to me as good and worthwhile as many kinds of modern novel.

For this first week, I suggest Offspring, an Australian television show conceived and written by Debra Oswald with two collaborators, which started in 2010 and runs through seven seasons, with 85 episodes, available on Netflix. The main protagonist in the series is Dr Nina Proudman (played by Asher Keddie, centre-left in this picture). At the beginning she is in her early thirties, an obstetrician whose professional skills range from super-competent to absolutely brilliant. And there are lots of engaging scenes of babies being born (so much better than the frequent televisual fare of men with guns). The second protagonist is her older sister, Billie Proudman (played by Kat Stewart, top right-hand corner in the picture); very out-there, sexy, sometimes aggressive, sometimes affectionate. 

Along with her professional activities, Nina, sometimes known as Nins, is usually in a bit of muddle personally. She has problems with her family (her sister Billie, her brother Jimmy, her mum, and her dad). She has friendly, and often very funny, interactions with other doctors, and with nurses, in her workplace, a hospital in Melbourne. And she falls love with people in ways that don’t quite work out.

What is special, however, about this series, is its focus is on two aspects that had not quite emerged in the Nineteenth-Century novel. One of these—the main one—is Nina’s inner thoughts, edited into the action in a perfect way, so that although they are visualized and often spoken out-loud by the actress (Asher Keddie), as an audience member one knows instantly that they are Nina’s thoughts, memories, scenes of imagination, fantasies, and not aspects of her ongoing interactions with others. If we had been able to overhear Virginia Woolf, as she time-travelled from 1925 when she published Mrs Dalloway, to the first episode of Offspring, in 2010, we might have heard her whisper: “Yes.” The second aspect is the focus, not on events, not on what goes well or badly (although good and bad events happen), but on the relationships among the characters, which emerge and evolve. Lovely.   

Jessica Black & Jennifer Barnes (2015). Fiction and social cognition: The effect of viewing award-winning television dramas on theory of mind. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9, 423-429.

Debra Oswald, John Edwards, & Imogen Banks (2010-2017). Offspring. Network 10. 

David Simon (2002). The wire. HBO Television Network.

Virginia Woolf (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.

Marguerite Duras The Lover

Marguerite Duras’s novel, The Lover, is able to reach, in a paragraph, to the heart of who we are, in ourselves and with other people. How can a book reach us, in this kind of way? Here are four ideas.

A first idea was suggested by John Ruskin and Marcel Proust. It is that books are friends. But when we take up with a book rather than with a person, we don’t have to worry: “What did she or he think of me?” Whereas, in ordinary life, the people we meet depend on circumstance, with books we are not restricted. We can choose from across time, and from all over the world. The idea of book-as-friend is a metaphor. But it’s more than that. A novel or short story offers a kind of invitation, in the way that a person might. So a book might say: “Please engage with me, maybe just for a short time.“ And, in the same way as some people affront us with something like: “Look at me, I’m far better than you,” so a book may issue a challenge. Other books, like some people, affect indifference.

A second idea is that we human beings construct mental understandings of each other. Without doing so, we could not interact, could not make arrangements with each other. We can often understand fictional characters better than many people we know. Sometimes, too, we can apply that understanding to our own selves. Then we can carry this kind of improved understanding into our day-to-day lives. 

A third idea is that novels and short stories have to do with consciousness. Human consciousness is imagination, of words and images in which one aspect is what we know from our past, episodes of experience, skills, and knowledge. The second aspect is our understanding of the current social situation. The third aspect is of ongoing plans for ourselves and with others. Narrative has this very same structure: evocations of what’s remembered, circumstances and the emotions that are elicited in them, plans about what to do. A novel or short story, then, is a piece of consciousness that the author has constructed to exist on its own out there, with the possibility of it being taken up, and taken in, to become a reader’s own. With some books, though, an individual reader may not want to take in the piece of consciousness.

A fourth idea concerns resonance: whether a story evokes aspects of one’s idiosyncratic past, or of one’s culture, or both. When this happens, there can be a sense of recognition; we can also understand hints and nuances. But that doesn’t mean we can only successfully read about our own culture. If one could only take in books from one’s own culture, men could never enjoy writers who are women nor women enjoy writers who are men.

Marguerite Duras was born in 1914 and grew up near Saigon, in Vietnam, third child and only daughter of a married couple from France who took jobs in this French colony. Her father was a professor of mathematics in a school there, but Marguerite scarcely knew him because, soon after she was born, he became ill, moved back to France, and died there when she was five. She had two brothers: the elder four years older than her, and the younger, who was a bit developmentally delayed, two years older than her. She remembers her elder brother as cruel. He would beat up the younger brother, and terrorize his sister. He was the only one of her three children who was loved by their mother, who was also a teacher. Marguerite remembers her mother as proud that her daughter was clever, but says that her mother was hard on her, and sometimes beat her. Marguerite and the younger brother did love each other and this occurs, too, with the narrator and the younger brother of the novel. Also, as in the novel, Marguerite began an affair with a Chinese lover, who was aged 27 when she was fifteen-and-a-half. When she was 17, she went to Paris to go to the Sorbonne, starting in mathematics. Then she moved to political science, then law. In the War she was in the Resistance and became a member of the Communist Party.

The Lover, written by Duras when she was 70, is a book about a lover and a family. It’s both an autobiography and a novel in which, at a young age, the narrator finds that she can be loved. The first evocations of this are tender and moving. But in the middle of the book comes a paragraph that is shocking. It starts like this, on page 46: “I tell him to come over to me, tell him he must possess me again. He comes over.” Then we read this: “He … says he knew right away, when we were crossing the river, that I’d love love, he says he knows now that I’ll deceive him and deceive all the men I’m ever with …” Then this: “He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love … nothing’s wasted, the waste’s covered over in the torrent, in the force of desire.” In English, the words “whore,” and “slut” have no male equivalents (perhaps it’s the same in French). What do we make of that? This calling of names is followed, on page 97, by what the narrator’s mother says, when she finds out about the affair. She accuses her daughter of “blatant prostitution,” and calls her a “little white tart.” 

The paragraph that starts on page 46 is an indication, I think, of how the narrator feels, when she is loved by her lover … so that, at the same time, she also despises herself in a way that, during her childhood, her mother has made her feel despised. What do we make of how we can carry forward feelings of our earliest relationships into our later love-relationships?

Among reasons for the derogatory words used by the lover, and later by the mother, are that, although the narrator is French and a white person, her lover is Chinese. So, for her mother and for French society at that place and time, what the narrator does must absolutely not be done. It’s far worse than having an affair while still at school.

The book is written in the first person, and ranges from the time in the 1930s when the narrator lived near Saigon, when she crossed the Mekong River and first met her lover, to later times, in Paris, when she has a child and when she is in the middle of World War II. Part of what makes Duras’s writing so engaging, I suggest, is that she writes in paragraphs and short sections, in the kind of way that consciousness works, thinking this, then that, sometimes coming to wonder, sometimes feeling delight, sometimes reaching no conclusion.

The family dynamics in The Lover are dreadful. When a child grows up knowing that a sibling is cared about far more than they are, this tends to have a life-long negative effect. For both Marguerite herself, and for the narrator of the novel, this combines with the absence of a father, and with the experience of being hated by her elder brother. Perhaps the fact of being left alone by her husband was a factor in the mother loving her older son. This boy grows up to be repellant, a layabout, never interacting with others except to say or do something malicious, stealing from his mother to buy drugs and to gamble, so that even though the mother and the family live in poverty, he further impoverishes them. Later on, in the novel, during the war, the narrator says: “I see war time and the reign of my elder brother as one … I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning ... (p.67).”

In terms of the four ideas, this novel came to me with an invitation, as a friend. I became able to understand the character of the narrator, her lover, and to some extent her mother and her elder brother. It seemed also, to me, an engaging piece of consciousness that I wanted to take in and make my own. And, quite strongly, I experienced several kinds of resonance. 

Marguerite Duras (1986) The Lover (translated by Barbara Bray) London: Flamingo (original publication of L’Amant, in France, 1984).

Marcel Proust &  John Ruskin (2011). On reading, & Sesame and lilies 1: Of kings' treasuries (translated by Damion Searls). London: Hesperus.

Toni Morrison's Jazz

The 1992 novel, Jazz, by Toni Morrison, is original and engaging. In Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, Virginia Woolf accomplished a novel of inwardness. In Jazz, Toni Morrison accomplished a further step: a novel of relationship. She did this by basing her book on a form of music—jazz—in which a theme is introduced and then, as in some pieces of classical music for instance by Bach, variations are offered. In this novel, the variations suggest ways in which different people experience a certain event (which one may think of as a theme) and, with this, their relationships change. 

Jazz is a kind of love story, a mode that’s virtually a human universal. But this one is different, because it is not just a love story but a story of other kinds of relating as well. Following this novel, books in which relationship has come to the centre seem to be more frequent. So, for instance, in 2007, Katy Roiphe published Uncommon Arrangements, a biography not of a person but of relationships in marriage. Then came the novels of Elena Ferrante. The first, My Brilliant Friend, published in English in 2012, is not really about the friend as such, but about the narrator’s relationship with the friend when they were young. Then, in subsequent novels, Ferrante has written about how the relationship developed into adulthood.

Morrison states the theme of her novel at the book’s beginning. The fifty-year-old Joe is in love with an eighteen-year-old, Dorcas. At a party, he shoots her. As Morrison writes in the fourth and fifth line of the novel, he did this “just to keep the feeling going.”  No-one sees the shooting, and Joe is not arrested. He is married to Violet, but they’re not much in touch with each other. At Dorcas’s funeral, Violet stabs the dead girl with a knife, and wonders how she might take on some of the characteristics of Dorcas, so that Joe will love her.

Morrison’s suggestion in her novel is that being black in America gives one not just the legacy of slavery, but continuing oppression, so that achievement becomes difficult, and for many people almost impossible. But the human spirit is not suppressed. In the kind of society that has resulted, the focus has come to be on relationship. Jazz is a form of music that arose in this society, a form based on the relationships among the players, that depicts sadness (as in the blues), suffering, sometimes violence but, at the same time, progress.

By starting with a theme, and progressing through a sequence of chord structures, the musical form of jazz is based on improvisation in which the players of different instruments, and sometimes a singer, improvise in relation to each other. This is the kind of structure that Morrison uses in her novel. 

The events with which the novel starts occur at the beginning of 1926. As the narrator says, after World War I: “Armistice was seven years old when Violet disrupted the funeral” (p. 9). Both Violet and Joe had been married for many years and had come from the rural South, to live in Harlem which, in the novel, is called “The City.” They had been getting along with each other, in a way, but not so well. They had no children together and this too, becomes a theme. Both realize that they did not really choose each other. Thinking back to when they met Violet says: “from the very beginning I was a substitute. And so was he” (p. 97). It’s many years later that Joe does make a choice: he come to love Dorcas. On page 135 he says, as if he were speaking to her: “I chose you. Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out … I didn’t fall in love. I rose in it.”

Part of the performance of jazz music involves solos by players of particular instruments. In the book this is mirrored by stories told by Violet and Joe about their early lives in the South. Later in the book other characters enter as well. They include Malvonne Edwards, from whom Joe rents a room for a few hours a week, in the building in which he lives, so that he and Dorcas can meet there to have sex. Then there is Alice Manfred, who took Dorcas on when her mother (Alice’s sister) was killed in the anti-black race riots of St Louis in 1917, in which many people died.

There’s some wonderfully lyrical writing in this novel. Here’s an example.

A colored man floats down out of the sky blowing a saxophone, and below him, in the space between two buildings, a girl talks earnestly to a man in a straw hat. He touches her lip to remove a bit of something there. Suddenly she is quiet. He tilts her chin up. They stand there. Her grip on her purse slackens and her neck makes a nice curve … Do what you please in the City. It is there to back and frame you no matter what you do… Hospitality is gold in this City. You have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit (pp. 8-9). 

After Dorcas’s death, Violet comes to know and relate to both Alice Manfred and Malvonne Edwards. Then, later as well, Dorcas’s best friend Felice enters the story, as does a young man called Acton, whom all the young women want to be with. Dorcas manages to catch him, and starts to have sex with him. Joe realizes this. And that is the reason—well, one of the reasons—he shoots Dorcas. What happens, then, in the relationship between Violet and Joe? To find out, you need to read the novel.  

At the end of her book, Morrison adds the loveliest coda, in which the novel’s narrator speaks to the author. By means of what she says, in a Proustian way, she speaks to us, the readers, engaging us also in relationship with the novel’s characters and events, as well as with the narrator … and the author.

Elena Ferrante (2012). My brilliant friend (A. Goldstein, Trans.). New York: Europa Editions.

Toni Morrison (1992). Jazz. New York: Knopf. Page numbers are from the 2004 paperback edition, with a new Foreword by the author, published by Vintage International.

Katy Roiphe (2007). Uncommon arrangements: Seven portraits of married life in London literary circles, 1910-1939. New York: Virago.

Virginia Woolf (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.