The Literary Critical Detective on Trains

My work as the Literary Critical Detective normally requires me to sit patiently and quietly, here, in the study, surrounded by my scribbled notes, the amber glow of my lamp and the smell of old books. However, over the last two weeks I have been forced to leave my room and travel. More specifically, I have had to take the train. I have spent days dashing across concourses to make connections – an act in which I have taken a curious kind of pleasure, and which I have interpreted as simply another version of the Literary Critical Detective’s work.

I made use of the time to read. Despite the purposefulness of my journeys these trips have actually taken me away from my planned reading trajectory. I sat and read Virginia Woolf’s masterful novel Mrs Dalloway, a text that is itself more concerned with planes and omnibuses than trains.

Françoise has insisted that such journeys are pointless. She begrudgingly waved me off one morning whilst muttering about the number of books that I already owned and the impossibility of needing any new materials.

For my part, I have always enjoyed train travel. In an instant I feel like all those literary characters. Remember that Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson are always jumping onto trains and heading out of London at a moment’s notice. 

And so I have begun to think about the best ‘train’ scenes in literature. Here are some of my favourites. What are your favourite ‘train’ scenes or novels? (Comments below are welcome).

1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina – this novel begins and ends with wonderfully moving train scenes.

2. Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe – in this novel Mme Verdurin’s social circle travel by train to her house for the summer season. Here, the train carriage itself becomes a salon on rails.

3. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express – a wonderful mystery whose action and detection works its way through private carriages and public cars alike.

On not setting myself ‘reading goals’.

I have never set myself ‘Reading Goals’ – you know the kind of thing: ‘I will read 50 books this year’; or, ‘I will read 25 “classics” this year’.

Many other readers do and I am not criticising them for it. I am glad that those readers are reading so voraciously.

The reason I do not approach my own reading in this manner is that it presupposes I have a certain number of set outcomes that I wish to achieve. It presupposes that I know in advance what I want to find in the chosen texts and that I will, without question, find it there. The novels piled up before me have, as it were, made plain their meaning to me in advance.

At worst, this attitude to reading threatens to turn a careful and attentive approach to meaning into an exercise in which you simply place ticks on a kind of cultural checklist. (Although it doesn’t do this as a matter of course.)

In my work as the Literary Critical Detective my approach to reading is not without purpose. Far from it. In each of my 'cases' I solve literary-critical mysteries that were not even mysteries. I can only do this through a structured response to image and metaphor. However, I am happy to pursue the vicissitudes of study.

An example of my reading: at the beginning of 2011 I reread the first half of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-8), a text that I had first read in its entirety 13 years earlier. Once I’d reached the half way stage in this miraculous novel, and Clarissa herself had been firmly established in London, I put the book down and picked up another – namely, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. This in turn caused me to return to Freud and then, in a sharp turn, to read Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf

Those of you who kindly pay attention to my scribbled thoughts will know that I have written of ‘readingtrajectories’. Now that I think about it, I find this term uncomfortable. It lacks the appropriate level of uncertainty. Perhaps I can only know in which direction I am travelling but not exactly where I am.

At the moment I do not know entirely know where I am. I have lost my book mark. However, I do know where I am heading. When I have finished reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment I will read:

Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot quitte la scène (Librairie des Champs-Élysées).

This is the French language translation of Agatha Christie’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. I shall read the two texts (original and translation) alongside each other, with a French-English dictionary to hand.

I then expect to read:

Albert Camus, L’étranger.

However, we shall see.

The Resumption of Reading: My Reading Trajectory Reappraised

Those of you kind enough to pay attention to these scribbled notes will know that towards the end of last year the path of my reading had lead me, ineluctably, to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, Crime and Punishment.

As the dark nights stretched out I began to make may way through the great length of this great novel. Only, somehow, in the darkness of those evenings I lost my way and eventually ground to a halt. I feared I would take a wrong interpretative step. The light from the lamp on my bureau guttered and flickered. It then became dim, turning from an amber glow to a sickly pallor.

I admit that I had made myself a map along the way – a list of character names. However, it was no good returning to this document without a compass and the time to re-orientate myself.

It is now starting to get a little lighter. The crocuses have emerged from the ground. And now, in this growing brightness I am resuming my reading. Although the text is a dark one – thematically, and in terms of its setting, I feel that this new springtime light will help guide me to the end of the text.

I’m picking up the action with 100 pages to go. Raskolnikov has just chatted to Porfiry, who has shown his hand.

I will write again when I’ve finished the novel.

The Colour and Consistency of Amber

It is too dark in here. The light that my brass lantern causes to seep across the desk seems to have the colour and consistency of amber. I cannot turn it up any brighter so I have just lit a number of tall candles. However, the wicks are already starting to burn low and the flames are guttering and flickering. The dark shadows next to the bookcases seem to be growing deeper and denser with each passing minute. They are pulling things into obscurity even as I write. I cannot see the corners of my room anymore.

It is not light enough to read with any care or precision. Françoise has already chastised me for attempting to work in this gloom. ‘It will only damage your eyes. You have to wear those glasses as it is because of all that close work you do. I wouldn’t work in this light.’ Of course, she doesn’t realise the obligation that these texts have placed me under this evening. How could she? I am only just beginning to realise it myself. And in any case, I am starting to believe that this darkness could bring with it some enlightenment. Maybe by losing my bearings, by being unable to see the critical and theoretical signposts, I will happen across a new path to meaning. Maybe.

A draught has just blown in through the sash of my study window. For a moment it seemed as though it had brought some of the night sky in with it. Actually, I can see that it just blew out one of the candles.

Reading Trajectories

My reading is usually fairly wide ranging – both by necessity and by choice. This attitude has not made for a very coherent bookshelf but it has helped me immensely in my work as a literary critical detective.

However, over the last few weeks a certain pattern seems to have emerged from the vagaries of my choices.

The last few texts I have read are:

1.     Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux camellias

2.     Alphonse Daudet, Letters from my Windmill

3. Anatole France, Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet and Other Profitable Tales

4.      Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

5.      Cara Black, Murder in the Marais.

The next book I will be reading will be Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic, Nausea.

I drew up this reading record last night for my own benefit. When I did so it occurred to me that all these volumes have one thing in common. And that one thing, or place, is Paris.

I will limit myself to just two comments about this fact.

Firstly, let me say that I hadn’t really intended to read two books by Anatole France at all. I bought one in a small shop in Oxford, the other on an antique stall in Yorkshire. Strangely enough, they each cost the same amount – £4. They were also in a similarly poor condition: their spines were ripped and their pages slightly damp to the touch.

 They are just the kind of volumes that Françoise chastises me for buying. ‘But why,’ she says, ‘do you insist on filling your study with these musty old books when you could buy pristine new copies of the same texts.’ She is right as always. I am sure that I could have bought modern critical editions of these works.

My interest in old Anatole really only lies in his complicated and somewhat patronising relationship to Proust – he wrote the ‘Preface’ for the younger man’s Pleasures and Days. France’s style is easy going and at times quite lyrical (at least in these translations) but is nothing compared to that of his one time acolyte. It lacks the insight, precision and even the directness of Proust.

The second thing I would wish to say about this unlooked for connection is that my own writing has caused me to think about Paris. So perhaps the coincidence is really no coincidence at all.

Now, however, my focus has shifted. Another text lies in front of me – and it is one that is set in a different city in a different country. St Petersburg. (I am looking at the small globe in my study as I write these words. Leaning the candle towards its surface I can see the dot that represents the city).

The text is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. This is a text that has, in a sense, always been there ahead of me. It is now almost time to confront it.

In the Clearing: a space to think and write.

I have finally managed to create a kind of clearing in my study. I will now be able to look around me and get my philosophical bearings.

I thought I had understood the literary materials I had been working on. I had made perfect kinds of non-sense of them. The case was almost closed. It soon sprung open again. The more I thought, the more I had to read. And the more I read, the more I needed to read. And the more I needed to think and write.

The mystery novels were soon buried under a mass of other materials. Texts piled up on texts. I pushed  various objects to the back of my desk. The photos of Proust and the old Broadwood piano were shoved away. One old postcard fell down the back of a bookcase. I did not retrieve it.

There, on the floor, were copies of works by Plato and Aristotle, arranged in piles. To my right, all the documents relating to one of my previous projects had spilled out of a folder and had not been replaced. Sheets of lined paper covered in faded, hand-written notes; copies of paintings; music; manuscript paper; the letters of some great author.

Now, though, I have got everything in something like an order.

Françoise is very happy with this change. She attributes this miraculous event to her own influence, her own pervasive sense of propriety. When she came into my study a few moments ago she almost fell over herself with surprise. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s about time. I told myself you needed to have a good sort out. How could you ever have expected to get any work done with all that paper sitting around?’ I told her that I was a critic, a detective-critic, and that all these documents were essential to my thinking. Her face lit up with a smile that told me that she felt nothing if not sorry for me. ‘You call yourself a writer,’ she continued, her tone one of supreme condescension, ‘and yet you never write. You tell me that you are reading and yet you never read. All you ever seem to do, so far as I can see, is take books off the shelves – books that I will only have to put back.’ These were, I admit, hard words to hear – hard because true. Françoise sees through me.

I’m sitting in the clearing I have created for myself. I am calm.

The philosopher Heidegger speaks of standing in the clearing – a space in which Being is revealed. My clearing is not that kind of clearing. It is just a space in which to write.

The Notebooks of Fictional Detectives

I have become increasingly interested in the notebooks of fictional detectives.

Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn, the central character in Ngaio Marsh’s mystery novels, is always writing in his. And then there is Columbo, who makes scribbled notes whenever he can remember which pocket his book is in, and whenever he has a pencil.

How I would love to pour over these hasty memorandums, these jotted references to times and dates, names, lists of clothing and motives.

Of course, in one sense I have been reading these notebooks – they are the classic murder mystery itself, en abyme. The whole of the plot is worked out between their covers.

As a literary critical detective I am a compulsive keeper of notes. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been given two splendid books especially for use in my critical investigations (see the post for 12^th January 2011 below). They are on my desk now, next to my mug of tea and a Ngaio Marsh omnibus.

I record odd metaphors, flashes of creative-critical insight and echoes between texts and contexts.

And this blog is itself a kind of notebook.