DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 DETECTION OR ENDLESS DEFERRAL/ABSENCE IN DETECTIVE FICTION: AGATHA CHRISTIE'S AND THEN THERE WERE NONE POLİSİYE ROMANDA YAKALAMA YA DA SONSUZ KAÇMA/KAYBOLMA: AGATHA CHRISTIE'NİN “AND THEN THERE WERE NONE” BAŞLIKLI ROMANI M. Ayça VURMAY Yrd. Doç. Dr., Mustafa Kemal Üniversitesi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölümü, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı, [email protected] Abstract Detective ction, one of the most popular genres of the novel, is grounded on the concepts of crime and detection. The rise in detective ction is followed by the surge of theories on this genre, particularly informed by (post)modern readings. Agatha Christie, "the Queen of Makale Bilgisi Crime", not only contributed to the founding of the conventions of the genre, the "rules" of the "game", but she also deed and subverted the very codes of the genre during the Gönderildiği tarih: 16 Ağustos 2017 Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Therefore, Christie's novels can be read as the decoding or Kabul edildiği tarih: 22 Ekim 2017 deconstruction of the genre as well. Christie's And Then There Were None depicts the Yayınlanma tarihi: 27 Aralık 2017 double-faced nature of truth or detection, as it reects the endless doubling and deferral of presence/absence, criminal/victim, and lawgiver/lawbreaker. The nursery rhyme "Ten Article Info Little Indians" ("niggers"/"soldiers"), which is central to the novel, is a centripetal as well as Date submitted: 16 August 2017 a centrifugal force serving as the element through which meaning disseminates into others Date accepted: 22 October 2017 inside and outside. The rhyme enacts the uid nature of signiers of truth through the Date published: 27 December 2017 doubling of binaries such as innocence/guiltiness, childhood/adulthood, nurturing/indifference, white/black, self/other, primitive/civilized, and presence/absence. The rhyme, as well as the narrative is integral to moral, psychological, Anahtar sözcükler sociocultural, racial, and colonial/imperial implications. Even lacking a detective, this Suç Romanı; Polisiye Roman; Agatha detective novel epitomizes detection as evasion or absence. The aim of this paper is to Christie; And Then There Were None; inspect the detective genre with a view to the performative, slippery, and ludic aspect of Yapıbozuculuk detection/truth as well as the dissemination, deferral or "purloining" of meaning through And Then There Were None. Keywords Öz Crime Fiction; Detective Fiction; Roman türünün en popüler alt-türlerinden biri olan polisiye roman, suç ve yakalama Agatha Christie; And Then There kavramları üzerine kurulmuştur. Polisiye romanın yükselişini bu türü irdeleyen ve Were None; Deconstruction özellikle (post)modern yaklaşımlara dayanan kuramlara duyulan büyük ilgi takip etmiştir. "Polisiye türünün Kraliçesi" Agatha Christie, bu türün Altın Çağında başlıca kaidelerini, "oyun"un "kural"larını koymakla kalmamış, aynı zamanda türün kodlarını sorgulamış, tersyüz etmiştir. Bu nedenle Christie'nin romanları polisiye türünü deşifre DOI: 10.1501/Dtcfder_0000001554 edici ya da yapıbozucu yaklaşımlar olarak da incelenebilir. And Then There Were None romanında gerçeğin ya da suçluyu yakalamanın ikiyüzlü doğası, varlık/yokluk, suçlu- kurban, yasa yapan/yasa çiğneyenin sonsuz ikililiğinde ve sürekli elden kaçmasında görülür. Romanın merkezinde bulunan çocuk şarkısı/tekerlemesi "Ten Little Indians" (Niggers, soldiers) [On Küçük Yerli/Zenci/Asker], anlamın içerde ve dışardaki başka anlamlara dağılmasını gerçekleştiren, merkezkaç ve merkezcil kuvvettir. Bu çocuk şarkısı, gerçeğin göstergelerinin akışkanlığını, masumiyet/suçluluk, çocukluk/yetişkinlik, korumacılık/kayıtsızlık, siyah/beyaz, ben/öteki, ilkel/uygar ve varlık/yokluk gibi ikili zıtlıkların yerdeğiştirmesi yoluyla sahneler. Tekerlemenin yanı sıra anlatının kendisi de ahlaki, psikolojik, sosyokültürel, ırksal ve sömürgesel/emperyal anlamlar yüklüdür. Dedektiften yoksun olan bu polisiye romanda gerçek kavramı, kaçma ya da kaybolma olarak temsil edilir. Bu makalenin amacı polisiye türünü, gerçeğin edimsel, kaygan ve oyuncu yönleri açısından ve And Then There Were None romanında anlamın dağılması, ötelenmesi ya da "çalınma"sını "teftiş etmek"tir. Detective ction, established on the motif of “crime and detection”, has appealed to numerous readers over the ages being connected with the essential human condition which involves humanity's endless quest for truth/detection in a world dominated by the eternal strife between self and other, good and evil, innocence and crime, where truth is contingent and resists detection. Detection is constantly deferred in literary texts, thereby turning out to be a dissemination or proliferation of meanings, selves 1127 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 or reality. In other words, detection proves to be impossible or unstable as it is revealed in the very mechanisms of the genre, which relies on concepts of absence, play and suspension. Christie’s And Then There Were None, which may be considered the epitome of the novels of crime and detection, depicts the undetectability of truth as it deals with the constant play of signifiers of truth, reflecting a society in which the boundaries between the respectable and offender are blurred, and no one is exempt from crime. The sense of deferral can be seen in the vacillation and doubling of the binary opposites in that binaries such as suspect/criminal and victim, crime and justice, criminal and judge, criminaland detective, homely and unhomely, host and hostileare destabilized and reversed within the drama of the text. Dissemination pervades the entire novel, including textual/intertextual elements such as the alternative titles of the book, the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Niggers” (or “Indians”/”Soldiers”) which (de)frames the narrative, the (false) letters, the absent host(ess), the setting, the Epilogue and the last part(that is the manuscript). The text is further connected with (inter)textual elements such as the War, sociocultural, psychological, racial and imperial discourses. Focusing on the theories of crime and detective genre, and referring to the views of theorists such as Derrida and Bhabha, this paper argues that crime resists detection and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None embodies the ambivalence and complexity of truth/detection. The terms "crime fiction" and "detective fiction" are two overlapping genres which are often used interchangeably. To distinguish between the two terms, it may be assumed that crime fiction is an umbrella term for crime in general whereas detective fiction is particularly concerned with the process of detection and/or detectives. Crime fiction is considered to have risen in literary status since the 1960s with the blurring of the borders between high and low literature. However, as Priestman points out, it was only after the 1980s that crime fiction and theories on crime genre developed moving away from detective or mystery fiction which established the rules and theories of the genre in the interwar years or the Golden Age (Priestman 1). In other words, the term "crime fiction", which is a broader term has replaced the term "detective fiction" and crime fiction proliferated in social/cultural terms, including various media (2). Having mentioned the ambivalence concerning the definition of the genre of crime or detective fiction, it could well be said that a sense of deferral dominates the genre. In Rzepka's words, "If the term 'crime fiction' is a bit vague, 'detective fiction' is 1128 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 downright slippery" (Rzepka 2). Investigating the differences between crime and detective genres, Heta Pyrhönen states that the focus in crime fiction is on the motives of the criminal, that is, the question "whydunit" rather than the detective and "whodunit" unlike the novels of detection: "By relegating the detective interest to the sidelines, crime fiction focuses on a criminal’s mind and deeds" (Pyrhönen 44). Reflecting on the idea that detective fiction has attracted critical theories more than crime fiction, held by such critics as Heta Pyrhönen, Rzepka says: [...] this may be because this analeptically engaging feature of the detective plot has made it so much more interesting to theorists of language, form, and representation – to narratologists, structuralists, and postmodernists – than crime fiction in general (Rzepka 3). Christie's detective fiction falls intothe "Golden Age" of detective fiction which covers the period between the First and Second World Wars, however they extend into the postwar era, and are regarded as representative of the "country-house murder" or the whodunnit. Yet Christieisalso considered eager to "subvert" the very genre of the "whodunnit" (Scaggs 26). The reasons for the failure of the Golden age fiction or the whodunit to survive the postwar period, as Scaggs articulates, could be that the whodunnit was seen as characterized by an ordered, quiet and certain world, which was incongruous with the contingencyof the postwar reality (29). The survival of the hard-boiled fiction in this period unlike the whodunit could be connected with their cultural, ethnic, and gender value which corresponded more to postwar climate (30). Golden Age novelists, including Christie are often criticized for dwelling too much on the mystery plot at the expense of character development (35- 36). Golden Age fiction, as well as Christie's novels are regarded as conservative and representative of the upper-middle class status quo in that they arebelieved to be secluded from the anxieties of the social and economic realities of the early 20th century such as the Great War and Depression era (47-48). As Scaggs comments, Christie's interwar fiction particularly is considered "to exclude from the positively Edwardian world they create all the devastation of the Great War and the social and economic upheaval of 1920s and 1930s depression" (48) and her rural settings, like those of much British Golden age novels are marked by a nostalgia for a return to an old, secure and ordered world (50). Foreignness is a central element of crime/detective fiction. As Colin Watson remarks, British detective fiction between the world wars was mainly influential in empowering Englishness by excluding foreign lands and the foreigners. The quiet 1129 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 and narrow middle-class setting of Christie's interwar stories, called "Mayhem Parva" by Watson, served to prop up the British middle class world (Watson 169- 171): "For the detective story was playing an increasingly important part in the attempts by the middle class to restore its nerve and to take its mind off the irrational and disconcerting things that other people, in other places, continued so wantonly to do" (167). The prevalence of xenophobia or the fear of foreigners was represented in Christie's fiction including the novel explored in the present study. Watson notes "Mrs Christie's awareness of how widespread in the England of 1936 was xenophobia, her own disapproval of which she implied" (174). Racism was another aspect of detective fiction in-between the 1900s-1950s, as racial fear and the association of race with crime was a dominant motif: "the fact of a public generally unaware of the ugliness of ethnic intolerance" (123). Investigating the role of foreigners in crime fiction from the 1900s to 1950s, Margaret Sönmez pinpoints the conservative role of crime fiction in relation to empire, gender, and race, which serves to maintain the status quo in that crime fiction from the 1900s to the 1920s in particular "exhibits an underlying fear of change with respect to empire and gender roles", as well as it displays "stark racism" (Sönmez 77). Furthermore, detective fiction from the 1930s to World War II, including Christie's novels, portrayed foreigners less than before and foreigners appeared in the novels of the period as "red herrings" so as to promote "social coherence" (Sönmez 79). Although Christie’s novels are criticized for lacking character development and for being removed from the social-cultural reality of the period, it can be argued that social-cultural issues including race and war are reflected mainly through characters’ consciousness, which Christie inspects closely and in detail as her novel studied in the present paper is concerned. That is to say, one can detect the sociocultural landscape of the era by contemplating her narrative. However not so obvious or direct, the traces of cultural and social issues are disseminated throughout the dialogical connections within Christie’s text. The place of crime/detective fiction in literature, and particularly the debates over whether detective fiction can be classified as high or low literature and if it has modernist or postmodern aspects have been examined by many critics. The place of detective genre in the literary canon and in literary theory is as ambivalent and resistant as the genre itself. The present study will look at the tensions within the genre both imposing and subverting the very assumptions it relies upon, the 1130 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 modernist-postmodernist aspects and look at the ways in which detection turns towards anti-detection or a postmodern play of deferral. Stressing the complex and fluid nature of the connections between genres and literature, including the relations between modernism and postmodernism Laura Marcus writes, Detective fiction has been central to psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, structuralist, semiotic, and poststructuralist narrative theories, and has been deployed both to secureand to trouble literary borders and boundaries, including the distinctionbetween high and low literature and the divide between modernist and postmodernist fiction (Marcus 245-246). The connections between detective fiction and postmodernity, particularly postmodern fiction shows that fiction of detection like postmodern literary texts aim to detect truth and provide solutions only to subvert or deny it. William Spanos conceives of the anti-detective story as the "archetype of the postmodern literary imagination" which defies reason, and aims"to evoke the impulse to "detect" and/or to psychoanalyze in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime (or find the cause of the neurosis)" (Spanos 154). To illustrate it, Spanosrefers to Christie's fiction as he writes, "just as though Agatha Christie’s detective, on the verge of unmasking the villain, had himself suddenly turned criminal” (155). Emphasizing the parallels between popular and postmodern, particularly the "metaphysical" or anti-detectivenovel, Marcus demonstrates that the motif of doubling in characters is central to postmodernist crimefiction as it "plays with the concept of the mirrored selves of detective and criminal", where the killer turns out to be the detective (Marcus 255). The ludic aspect of detective fiction, based on "play" was also highlighted by postmodern theorists and writers (262). The “double plot” is another central element of detective fiction, which shakes the notion of a fixed truth and emphasizes the polyphony and heteroglossia of possible narratives. The plot of detective novels contain double narratives of plot, as the first narrative gives a rough and also deceptive account while the second provides a detailed explanation of the story. The element of duplicity, as Cawelti puts it, is in line with the (post)modern reader’s “scepticism” and the continuous need for the search for truth “though truth is precarious and always elusive” (Cawelti 11-12). 1131 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 The elements of subversion and inversion which are integral to postmodern literature can be seen in not only postmodern detective novels but in the traditional or Golden Age examples as well, since the detective genre is constructed on the principle of game. Kathleen Owen mentions the subversion of the rules of traditional detective fiction such as lack of narratorial authority and lack of solution: “private solution or no solution; the violation of trust by the narrator, who has concealed an important piece of information; and the emotional attachment and regret the detective feels toward the criminal rather than the victim” (Owen 79). The subversion of the traditional role of the narrator as a reliable figure in traditional detective fiction is also at stake in the novels preceding the postmodern as well, as Owen illustrates with Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in which the narrator proves to be the murderer contrary to the reader’s expectations (79). The ambiguities and deviances governing the detective genre, as Lee Horsley demonstrates, include the duplication of detective-criminal-victim and the resistance to or absence of a solution to crime: There are, for example, ambiguities inherent in the doubling of the detective and the murderer; there are numerous narratives in which the classic triangle of victim - murderer - detective is destabilized by changes in the role of the protagonist; and apparent narrative closure often co-exists with the representation of crime as irresolvable and omnipresent in modern society (Horsley 29). The meta-fictional, self-reflexive aspect of the novels of the Golden Age, including Agatha Christie's fiction involve "characters often comment[ing] self- consciously on the fictional devices of the novels they inhabit, drawing attention to both the artificiality of the genre and the contrived nature of the crimes represented" (31). The increasing cultural significance of detective fiction, John Cawelti believes, is due to “the gradual assimilation into our idea of literature of popular genres that used to be sharply separated from the literary mainstream, most notably the detective story” which “has been reflected in the frequent use of detective story patterns by major modernist and postmodernist writers” (Cawelti 5-6).“The remarkable ethnic and gender diversity of recent detective stories” and “the remarkable flourishing of regional and local detectives” can be seen as the distinguishing aspects of the (post)modern international detective fiction (8).The “subversive element” in detective genre, Cawelti thinks, “has manifested itself in the 1132 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 genre’s increasing openness to women and minority groups” (6). The genre’s special appeal to women is also noted by Cawelti, as he states “women had an influence on the development of the detective story much greater than they had in any other literary genre except the romance", the reasons of which can be partly connected with the fact that “Even in the early days, the detective story strongly attracted women writers, perhaps in large part because, as an area of literature considered mere entertainment, it was more open to women than was “serious” literature” (6). Reading Christie’s novels as “a mere textual background between author and reader, Ina Rae Hark calls attention to the difficulty of the task of the reader to attain meaning where innocence and crime are interwoven and everyone is a possible murderer” (Hark 112). The “unreadability” of Christie’s texts, Hark states, is also manifest in the “written confessions as suicide notes” by for instance “the judge" in And Then There Were None which also shows that “her [Christie’s] books are about text, not crimes, and that her rationale for choosing murderers who affront readers’ preconceptions is about reading mysteries, not about identifying criminals” (114-115). The concept of genre has been destabilized mainly through poststructuralist and deconstructionist approaches to literature. Accordingly, binaries such as presence/absence, high literature/low literature, writing/speech have been unsettled or dismantled. In "The Law of Genre" (1980), Derrida articulates the idea that there is no pure genre. He pinpoints the fluidity and heterogeneity of genres within the same expression which argues that genres are pure or not [to be] mixed: “Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity” (203-204). However, he reverses his original statement by demonstrating that it is “impossible not to mix genres” (204). Thus, genres are not homogeneous but involve an impurity at their core: “what I shall call the law of the law of genre […] is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (205). Texts are distinguished from one another through the genre it is involved in however they do not “belong” exclusively to genres. In other words, there is always a fissure at the heart of literary genres, what Derrida calls "corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence" (204). Genres are like "floodgates", crossing of which is "deformation". As Derrida puts it: "this clause or floodgate of genre, at the very moment that a genre or literature is broached, at that very moment degenerescence has begun, the end begins" (213). 1133 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 Lacan's 1956 "Seminar" (1956) on Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1845) and Derrida's "The Purveyor of Truth" (1975) are among the early examples of the academic or critical appreciation of the genre of crime or detective fiction, thereby contributing to its conception as serious literature. Poe's text is about the "displacement of a signifier", the purloining of a letter. As Derrida notes: "Not that the letter never arrives at its destination, but part of its structure is that it is always capable of not arriving there" (Derrida, The Purveyor of Truth 66). In other words, the wholeness of the letter or unity of meaning can never arrive as it is already conditioned by predetermined "divisibility", "ever-possible partition", and "dissemination". The law of the signifier, of truth, of the letter, thus, is always at the risk of mutilation. The text "The Purloined Letter", for Derrida, is imbued with "indirection" or deferral: "a labyrinth of doubles without originals, of facsimile without an authentic, an indivisible letter, of casual counterfeits [contrefaçons sans façon], imprinting the purloined letter with an incorrigible indirection" (109-110). The deconstructive subversion and play which destabilizes the hierarchies is reflected as the reversal and play regarding the binary opposites including the main terminology and theory of the detective genre. In other words, the conception of detection is fused with deception or the text displays the impossibility of "detection" which is already "deception", disappearance, or "différance". Detective fiction is built on "absence" in keeping with the deconstructive approach. Crime or the criminal in a detective novel is only to be detected at the end, which shows the foregrounding of absence, which structures detective fiction. Each clue to the crime and the criminal gives way to the traces of other ones, thereby deferring detection or truth. Detection, meaning or truth, proves to be a supplement, an appendage which is constantly deferred. As it is observed in And Then There Were None, detection or truth can only be reached, if ever, as a supplement, a letter in the sea. Absence is a precondition of presence or detection, and what is reached is the trace of traces. The hierarchies concerning the binaries of absence/presence, deception/detection, and criminal/detective are unsettled and blurred in the novel. Christie's And Then There Were None was first published in the UK, 1939 under the title Ten Little Niggers (Bunson 18). However, as the word "nigger" was considered offensive, the novel was published under different titles. The first US version was published in 1940 under the title And Then There Were None (Bunson 18). In John Curran's words, the novel is "Christie's most famous novel, her greatest technical achievement and the best-selling crime novel of all time" (Curran 111). The 1134 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 nursery rhyme frame is a poem by Septimus Winner titled "Ten Little Indians" published in 1868 (Bunson 18). The original version of the novel uses the word "nigger" while the later alternative uses of it are “Indian” and "soldier". While some publishers adhered to the original book and saved the word "nigger", others particularly used the alternative title And Then There Were None, the setting "Soldier Island" and the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Soldier Boys" due to the offensive implications of the words "nigger" and "Indian". Christie also wrote a stage adaptation of the same novel in 1943. In contrast to the novel, the play had a happier ending, which befits the last stanza of Frank Green's version of the Septimus Winner rhyme, in which one Indian boy is left and is married (19). In her notes about the novel, Christie states that her motive was the “difficulty” of detection or impossibility of it:"I had written the book Ten Little Niggers because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious" (Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography 488). And Then There Were None deals with the story of crime committed on an island, where a judge proves to be responsible for the death of ten people, alleged to be criminals who have formerly escaped the Law. The crime or its detection is almost impossible as there is no witness, including the murderer but a manuscript written by the murderer and thrown into the sea. No one, no detective, not even Scotland Yard Commissioner or his assistant is able to detect the criminal and solve the mystery without the help of the murderer’s confession found completely by chance. The victims are summoned or invited to the island, which is the main setting, by an anonymous person, through letters. When they reach the island they find a frame of the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Soldier Boys” (“Indians”/”niggers”) in their room, and when they gather for dinner, they notice ten little statues of ten little soldier boys (“Indians”/”niggers”) on the table. During the dinner, an anonymous Voice coming from a gramophone charges the ten guests with specific crimes assuming the manner of a Judge in the Courtroom and then the ten guests die or vanish one by one, recalling the way each boy disappears in the nursery rhyme. The death/murder of each guest is accompanied by the disappearance of one china figure on the table. In the course of a chain of murders, each character/victim tries to make sense of their own experience on the island, try to figure out the identity of the murderer, strive to escape their own death, and attempt to confront their own guiltiness as well as comment on the others’ alleged 1135 M. Ayça VURMAY DTCF Dergisi 57.2 (2017): 1127-1150 crimes. The characters’ confrontation with their offenses have legal, moral, psychological and social aspects. The whole narrative sounds like a series of dreams or a phantasm, a kaleidoscope of endless sketches or fictions of truth, concerning multiple “I”’s on the “I”land. The novel is told in omniscient third person narration. However, it also incorporates the first person account of the judge murderer, a manuscript signed by him and attached as a separate part of the novel. The omniscient narrator enters the mind of every character, recording the thoughts and feelings of the ten guests/suspects/victims. The views of the characters are narrated through free indirect thought and stream of consciousness technique. Not only the content but also the form of the text contains digression and disruption as it involves a medley of texts and genres. The form of the novel betrays the idea of a pure form or genre, as it is comprised of letters, diaries, manuscripts, scenes, an epilogue, a play within a play or mise en abyme, a nursery rhyme or poem, a judicial case, a psychological/psychical case, and the news. In other words, the miscellany of texts in the novel is an evidence of the essential hybridity of the text and intertextual relations embedded in it. The novel has an episodic arrangement which resembles a play. Each chapter consists of sub divisions in the form of episodes which look like the scenes in a play. The text defies the notion of closure or solution as it lacks a single ending and there are two additional chapters including first the Epilogue and then the manuscript or letter which marks the ending. There is not a detective in And Then There Were None as far as the plot is concerned but a group of previously exonerated criminals and a judge assuming the role of the detective as well as other characters. The only real detectives, namely a Scotland Yard commissioner and his assistant inspector, are to be found only in the Epilogue, as a supplement, outside the plot. The novel plays with the idea of detection or truth as it renders thejudge volunteer to solve the crimes he is responsible for on the island. The game or irony is at the expense of the reader who learns at rest that the judge plays the roles of justice, criminal, suspect, detective, victim and narrator. As in Christie's othernovels characterized by games or puzzles, the element of play pervades And Then There Were None. Christie makes her reader guess the most likely suspect to be guilty, then first thwart their expectations by annihilating its possibility, and then reveal the most likely suspect as guilty. As Christie writes in 1136