The Truth Machine (15 page)

The first fictional genre to exploit such anxieties was the “sensation novel” that began with Charles Dickens'
Bleak House
(1853) and
Great Expectations
(1860), and Wilkie Collins'
Woman in White
(1860) and
The Moonstone
(1868). By turning melodramatic conflict inward, the sensation novel outraged critics for depicting heroes as morally ambiguous figures. Paranoid and suspicious, and set within domestic realms, the sensation novel typically featured a reputable citizen—often a woman—gradually revealed to have criminal attributes. “In these days of fiction,” wrote Alfred Austin in his 1870 essay, “The Sensation School,” “a change has really come over the spirit of our dreams.” “It is on our domestic hearths that we are taught to look for the incredible. A mystery sleeps in our cradles; fearful errors lurk in our nuptial couches; fiends sit down with us at table; our innocent-looking garden-walks hold the secret of treacherous murders; and our servants take £20 a year from us for the sake of having us at their mercy.”
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The effect of sensation was to make the familiar strange. By “domesticating the wild” the genre also “gothicized the normal.”
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The apparently normal fictional femme fatale, ostensibly a woman of good character, was an embodiment of criminality.
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Toward the end of the century, cheap production processes and rising literacy levels led to the explosive expansion of the market for novels and the popular periodical press. Novelists and journalists alike were seduced by criminology's rich imagery and explanatory principles. Detective fiction, after all, shares criminology's axiomatic premise: the identity of the criminal must become known, predicted, and recognized.
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Founded in France in 1825, the
Gazette des Tribunaux
filed reports on sensational criminal cases and became a source of information for both scientists and novelists. Criminal anthropology's key tropes became widely known in realms beyond the scholarly journal and the academic congress. In its coverage of the infamous “Jack the Ripper” murders in London, for example, the press justified the promotion of order by mobilizing the figure of criminal man within the milieu of working-class Whitechapel. The demarcation between the normal and the pathological was further disturbed by the suggestion that “mad Jack” might not be a member of the underworld, but a respectable medical doctor, in view of his apparent knowledge of human anatomy.
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The press appealed to advertisers by reporting on outrageous stories that stimulated their readership; circulation increased with the promotion of populist causes such as nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Spy and crime stories were also well received.
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The press was motivated by an ideology of neutrality, impartiality, and exhaustiveness, and it aimed for full coverage of
the “facts,” in which both sides of the story were ostensibly reported. Focus was on individual criminal cases rather than on the complex social dimensions of crime.
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The press reinforced social norms by privileging crimes of the lower orders, illegal escapades, stories of extraordinary misdeeds, and the daring exploits of master criminals. To protect the norms of the power interests that underwrote the press, criminal cases were discussed without referring to underlying socio-political conditions. It was imperative to titillate yet protect the reader with generic stories concerning cunning swindlers and their hapless victims. Thrilling but ultimately trivial crimes were reported in a terse, telegraphic fashion. Trials were narrated in the style of a stage play complete with star actors, captivating lawyers, and dramatic plots.
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The boundary between fact and fiction was porous. Crime fiction shared key images and tropes with journalism and criminology. Novelists contributed to criminology's project, promoting yet challenging the discipline's claims. In France, J. -H. Rosny aîné's
Dans les rues
depicted Fauburg street gangs as cavemen. Its Lamarckian thesis was that bad habits could turn a man into a criminal beast. Adrien Sixte, the central character of Paul Bourget's
Le Disciple
(1889), had been modeled on Hippolyte Taine, “the one the English gladly call the French Spencer.” The story concerned the psychologist's attempts to discover criminal man. Emile Zola's
La bête humaine
(1889–90) had also been inspired by the Italian criminologist. (In a circular irony, Lombroso himself drew inspiration from the novel.) The story accepts the demarcation of criminal from civilized man as a social and biological fact, but order is achieved through an integration of criminal instincts rather than their negation, suggesting that everyone was potentially contaminated with criminality. Zola's work has been interpreted as dramatizing the contradictions and disintegration of the positivism that had initially inspired his project.
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Novelists such as Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and particularly Bram Stoker all shared a fascination with the science of crime and the physiognomy of degeneration.
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In Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), a Victorian gentleman-scientist regresses to an apelike primitive. In Rudyard Kipling's short story “The Mark of the Beast” (1890), an Englishman in India defiles a Hindu temple and regresses to a wolflike state. Although the story offered a rational, medical explanation for the degenerative transformation, it suggested that Western science was impotent to elucidate the mysteries of the East.
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Decline had become a national concern following the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics in
1851. The discovery of the entropic cosmos occasioned reflections on the loss of human energies and the dissipation of vigor.
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Richard Dugdale's 1877 bestselling account,
“The Jukes”: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity
became a synonym for degeneracy on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Scientific and literary texts alike expressed fears about dissipation, degeneration, and decline. The fin-de-siècle British Gothic novel was dedicated to exploring the boundary between the human and what has been called the “abhuman.” A highly innovative genre that reemerges at periods of cultural stress, the Gothic violently enacts the reconstitution of the human body and mind. Scientists and novelists expressed nostalgia for the fully human subject, a project their work had undermined.
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Themes of human devolution occurred repeatedly in the fin-de-siècle Gothic, showing the beast within or as a means of demonstrating how casually cruel a nature driven by random change could be.
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The human body was conceptualized as utterly chaotic, unable to maintain its distinctions from an exuberant menagerie of spectacular possibilities: “slug-men, snake-women, ape-men, beast-people, octopus-seal-men, beetlewomen, dog-men, fungus-people.”
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An array of scientific discourses—including evolutionism, criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, sexology, mesmerism, and pre-Freudian psychology—all articulated new models of the abhuman body's ambiguities. With this crisis in the epistemology of human identity, science was infected with Gothic themes. Darwin had reconceptualized nature as a motiveless force, indifferent to suffering, that was, nevertheless, full of picturesque superabundance. Excessive and gratuitous, nature no longer evidenced divine benevolence but was a teeming chaos of meaninglessness and superfecundity. Natural selection incorporated the teratological and the fantastic, and gestured toward the grotesque.
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Lamarckian evolution similarly provided fruitful explanatory tropes and expressed deep anxieties concerning the health of the nation.
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The effects of alcohol, tobacco, opium, hashish, a poor diet, syphilis, and tuberculosis, as well as fears about the pathologies of the city were all seen as injurious to biological descent. Heredity was no longer considered the motivator of progress, but an invisible source of contamination and danger. In attempting to normalize the meanings of sexuality by delineating the many “perversions” the human body was capable of, sexology merely succeeded in multiplying sexual variety and enlarging the field of possibilities. It also undermined commonplace logics that posited corporeality as the exclusive property of femininity, a state that only masculinity could
transcend. Gender was itself an unstable category that had to be perpetually fashioned anew as part of “the immense cultural labour” required to produce and sustain the liberal humanist subject.
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By critiquing science's classificatory schemes, the Gothic delighted in the creation of monsters. Literary narratives exposed the social, economic, and political conditions of knowledge production, questioned the ontological status of criminal man, and disputed the possibility of science ever purifying its categories. Profound questioning of truths and assumptions were found in the entertaining narratives of novels that revealed “the unsayable of social discourse.”
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By blurring boundaries, novelists were able to challenge the axioms of determinist science. The figure of the criminal “beast” became, on this reading, an intertextual species that slipped between science, literature, and the mass media. Bram Stoker's
Dracula
(1897), a masterpiece of ambiguity and anxiety, was heavily influenced by Lombroso: “The criminal always works at one crime [Van Helsing explained]—that is the true criminal who seems predestinate to crime, and who will of none other. This criminal has not full man-brain… . The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.”
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The criminal tainting of aristocratic blood recapitulated the plotlines of several late Victorian novels.
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Descended from “noble blood”, the Count was, nevertheless, inherently corrupt. Animated by themes of hypnosis, hysteria, degeneration, and sexuality—a veritable Foucauldtian nightmare of biopower—the novel expressed the dangers of entering new places and experiencing new forms of consciousness. The poison of degeneration could be passed in blood from person to person, potentially infecting the entire population. Against the fantasies of Lombrosoians degeneration could not be contained. Deploying diaries, reports, and letters, the novel resists an easy synthesis. Yet it is concerned with resistance, frustration, and the failure of insight, “paralysed at a threshold of uncertainty, at the turning point between a psychiatric positivism (which the novel derided), and the glimpsed possibility of a new exploration of the unconscious.”
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Orthodox medicine is sleep walking, Stoker suggests, stumbling along in a half-light.

The modern figure of the detective emerged in the shadowy borderlands between vice and virtue, purity and corruption, and science and superstition. Arthur Conan Doyle's
A Study in Scarlet
(1887) has been credited with establishing many conventions of the detective novel such as scientific deduction as a means to knowledge. Holmes is nothing less than “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.”
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As an admiring
Watson tells the great detective, “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.”
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Viewed simply as a detective story,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
appears to dispel magic and mystery and to render everything visible to the scientific gaze. Yet it is as much a fin-de-siècle Gothic tale as it is detective story. The novel was influenced by Lombroso, as Watson's representation of Selden demonstrates: “Over the rocks in the crevice in which the candle burnt, there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt on the burrows in the hillsides. The light beneath him was reflected in his small, cunning eyes, which peered fiercely to right and left through the darkness, like a crafty and savage animal who has heard the steps of the hunters.”
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Relying on the conventions of contemporary Gothic narratives, it challenged the aspirations of science to subject crime and criminality to scientific analysis.
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With its use of multiple narratives that implicitly critique science's claim to a single unified truth, the Gothic was a counterattack against the excessive faith in positivist science and a subversion of received wisdom about criminality.
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Whereas Holmes— “part social physician, part magician”—can deploy his genius to solve crimes, Watson, a medical doctor, can solve nothing.
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The novel is simultaneously a detective story promoting the exclusive use of reason and deduction and a warning about the failures of modernity and the futility of scientism.
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Embodying the conflicting genres of the novel, Sherlock Holmes is associated with both light and darkness, with the urbanity and culture of modern London and with the elemental peat and granite of the primeval moor. “It is my belief, founded upon my experience,” Holmes tells Watson in
The Copper Beeches
(1892), “that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
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The paradox of Holmes is also the paradox of the detective story: the more it aims at a rational explanation of crime, the more its appropriation of the Gothic themes of criminal anthropology subverts that project.
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The figure of the “criminal genius” highlighted the instability of criminal anthropology as it combined the normal and the pathological.
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“A criminal strain ran in his blood,” Holmes says of Moriarty, a one-time professor of mathematics, “which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.”
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Recall that for Lombroso, genius had a “degenerative character.” For Lombroso, as for Galton, genius was a form of abnormality, a species of moral insanity. The hereditary
line need not run straight; a “good birth” guaranteed nothing. In
The Man of Genius
, Lombroso warned, “even habitually sober parents, who at the moment of conception are in a temporary state of drunkenness, beget children who are epileptic or paralytic, idiotic or insane… . Thus a single embrace, given in a moment of drunkenness, may be fatal to an entire generation.”
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