The Pornography or Moral Indignation

George Orwell once wrote that the root myth Western story was Jack the giant-killer. All of us do respond to forms of David-and-Goliath: the lone, noble hero; the apparently omnipotent conspiracy of evil; the close-shave ending; a coronation, a marriage—some utopian event reinstating the rule of sweetness and light.

This plot works inside most love comedies and most “threat-to-civilization” or “war-of-the-worlds” stories. More remotely, it lies behind the traditional detective story in all its varieties.

Previously I argued in these pages that the detective story has a theological aura about it (“Corpses, Clues, and the Truth,” August 30, 1974, page 16). It postulates a moral universe in which sin is always punished, because it is always discovered and assigned to its proper agent. The detective story is a species of moral fantasy. As such it acknowledges a simplified or partial vision of Christian ethics.

So far so good. But there are problems with this. The basically ethical vision is vulnerable to distortion. In a sense the detective story’s black-and-white ethics tell the truth; in a sense, they do not. They simplify the content of human experience. When does this simplification become a distortion? Perhaps only when it is taken too seriously. The classic ‘tec is a discreet, conventional form with its own revenge on over-zealous critics.

But it can be taken too seriously, I think, and this happens when it begins to satisfy a social need, or to express too fully a social attitude. Innocently pursuing its seminal fantasy—good (reason) over bad (murder)—the detective story may slip into another opposition: good (us) versus bad (them). What is originally a celebration of reason can become a celebration of power; the strength of justice degenerates into mere aggression. Thus the detective story may express, or even stimulate because it provides a means of expressing, social attitudes that are definitely sub-Christian—in any Christian sense, sub-ethical. It becomes part of what I am calling the “pornography of moral indignation.”

This is not merely speculative. Socially accepted violence against a minority scapegoat is and has always been part of the American tradition. It is realized in fiction as the elimination of whole tribes of Indians to make Abilene safe for the schoolmarm. In actual social history the impulse surfaces in race lynchings or comanchero justice. Currently it is visible in American TV’s binge of detective shows, where cops of all shapes and specialties hunt a monotonous array of criminals. Violence, both of language and of action, is essential.

Both the monotony and the violence are significant. One is the principle of the criminal’s characterization; the second the accepted way of dealing with him. Objectified, standardized, carefully alienated from understanding or sympathy, the villain is normative but in no sense “normal,” expected but undeveloped. He is no more human than a predatory Martian. He wears a predictable warpaint, making him easy to spot but quite devoid of human content.

The detective, in contrast, is compounded of “human touches.” He is endowed by his creators with charm as well as lethal fists and intellect. This is to be expected; he is the hero. It is the story’s essence that he win, and that he retain our sympathy. Every Jack-the-giant-killer story works this way. The problem arises in the detective’s real goal, and in the means he is allowed to use to reach it. In the traditional detective tale—that of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Dorothy Sayers—the goal is a just solution to a problem; the means are intelligence, speed, and fair play. On TV the goal is normally the elimination of a threat risen from another social world—gangster, junkie, foreigner—and, by implication, the preservation of our more familiar social world. The means is self-righteous violence.

A third consideration may be added to goal and means: the placing of the community, of the victims or bystanders with whom we identify. Everybody cheers for David, as against Goliath. But then everybody cheers for Israel as against the Philistines. The TV detective, like any other, acts on the community’s behalf, as our agent. But what values do we, the community, invest in his action? Justice, whoever suffers? Or the security of our own social world, whoever (else) suffers?

This narrowing of values from a more or less impersonal justice to the problem of preserving a definite social construct sets in motion a narrowing of the representative community as well. It always excludes more than it includes. Further, anyone outside the recognizable community that the detective represents is potentially suspect, and if suspect then alien, and if alien then disposable. This progressive exclusion reached a climax in a statement by one of these TV sleuths. Some people, he ruminated, regard the police as protecting the community. He, on the other hand, regards them as constituting the community. “Mankind” (served by justice) has shrunk to “society” (served by order) has shrunk to “us” (served by anything that will serve to keep us safe). Thus the detective is authorized to treat his opponents with any violence he deems necessary or desirable. He counts; they do not.

The social force behind this is anxiety—specifically, the anxiety of the patrons of TV and the cinema. Caught in a time of financial and ethical extremes, any class tends to shrink back for strength against a backbone of prejudice and self-absorption. The suburbanite who is no longer safe in car or home, who struggles to keep his domestic preserve free of the corruption he meets in the city where he works—it is inevitable that for him, society splits into “them” (evil) and “us” (good). This attitude is not new. It was, historically, the attitude of the class that first welcomed the emergence of the police novel from other sorts of crime literature—the Victorian bourgeois. For such a class, the detective naturally becomes a symbol of order and security; and the literary form, a natural expression of its insecurity and aggression.

Of course, the detective story’s ethical simplification invited this sort of use. Guilty or not guilty, black or white, is easily transformed to us or them. The dangerous but possible extension of this, which damages the detective tale irreparably, is the subtraction of moral restraint. When its anxiety reaches a certain intensity, the community becomes perfectly willing to forget the man in the criminal (or social disturber), to see him as an animal or a machine, and to sanction any means taken to snare and pacify him. “Anything to protect society (or civilization),” goes the official rubric. What is really being said is, “Anything to protect me and mine.”

It may be possible to extend this logic beyond the quest for security. For the dialectic of “us” and “them,” with established force supporting “us,” can be used to achieve as well as maintain power. Hitler was not the first or last to see the use of a cartoon enemy in organizing social anxiety for his own benefit. This observation can be exaggerated; some critics have argued that Fascism waits behind every Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers story. They are wrong, as we shall see, but not because the detective story is never bent that way—only because it need not be.

“Anything to protect me and mine,” measured by Christian standards, is clearly unacceptable. Even its milder versions, such as common moral indignation, are at best ambiguous feelings. Righteous anger has always the disadvantage of being anger. The response to sin which condemns the sinner wholesale was attacked by Christ himself in the Pharisees, and violates basic tenets of his message, such as the communities of sin and grace. For pharisaism was and is popular because it has ethical as well as social advantages. It allows us to isolate our sense of corruption in certain spots in the social fabric. We are pure. They—the “others,” publicans, infidels, or Mafiosi—are the source of the stench.

Some critics consider this sort of pharisaism the basic posture of all detective fiction. This is not historically true. The traditional detective story has its sights elsewhere, on the rational solution of a problem—sorting out complications and building inductive arguments. Sadism wrought on dehumanized villains would be out of place, bad form, and contrary to the story’s compulsory if narrow sense of fair play. In addition, and most important, the murderer is generally someone already plugged into the social system. He is the butler, for example, or Colonel Hawthorne back from India, or Roderick, the beautifully mannered cad from Cambridge. He is clearly one of us. The shock offered by the story’s denouement is not meeting an alien being but meeting an alien impulse in a familiar being. We are surprised and sobered. We allow the murderer to end his miserable life (and he is miserable, knowing he has let the side down) with a revolver in the library, the decent way.

It would be untrue to deny the presence of xenophobia and class awareness in early detective fiction. Conan Doyle, for instance, often had Holmes purging country estates of some apparently docile, socially “absorbed” being with a ghastly secret or an exotic past. In The Sign of Four the actual murder is committed by a dwarfish, evilly shaped Pacific aborigine. He is gladly done away with. But this is not quite the same as busting the anti-social weirdo or gangster. Doyle’s villain is too inhuman and sensationalistic to represent real social dangers—a toy, though a toy in a nightmare.

The true historical roots of the pharisaism we are tracing lie in the slightly later spy story. The “Bulldog Drummond” tradition, starring blond, blue-eyed athletes from British public schools and West End clubs, is a variation on this pharisaism, but not another thing. Drummond himself, the creature of H. S. Macneile, solved his cases with simple violence. In the name of civilization Drummond mauled the devious Italian or dirty Bolshevik who was making trouble. He did so with the hearty approbation of a certain class of British readers.

There is, however, a school of detective writing that avoids the pornography of moral indignation altogether. It is represented by Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Both Maigret and Brown approach their detective problems not by violence, or even impersonal logic, but by way of imaginative sympathy. Their chief identification may remain with law or justice. But their means of identifying culprits is by identifying with them—their needs, habits, circumstances.

Maigret runs the Quai des Orfevres (the Parisian Scotland Yard), and Simenon fills his books with meticulous detail. Like Holmes in London or Gervase Fen in Oxford, Maigret is most in his element in Paris. He has a knack, a genius, for absorbing atmosphere. He sizes up furnishings as a key to their owner’s mind; he moves from favorite bar to place of business in search of a dead man’s rhythm of life. Observers baffled by his superficially aimless wandering are missing the point. Maigret identifies the criminal by taking him in, so to speak; and when the chase is done, detective and murderer regard each other at least with understanding, not seldom with sympathy.

Father Brown takes this method to its proper conclusion by introducing a dose of theology. Chesterton’s stories are often explicitly religious. This distinguishes them from Simenon’s secular novels. They are also different by way of Chesterton’s fanciful settings and admittedly improbable crimes. The similarity between authors and detectives is exactly methodological. Like Maigret, Father Brown catches murderers by getting inside their skins, and the end is (or can be) some degree of sympathy.

The insignificant little priest starts his investigations with a specifically Christian notion: anything a murderer is capable of, I, the detective, am capable of; what drove him to murder could do the same to me. Correspondingly—and this is how theology completes the pattern—if I am the recipient of grace, so is the murderer. Father Brown’s motive is not the force of law or society’s security, but the call of his pastor’s heart. The murderer must be caught, so that he may be given the chance to repent.

This frees Father Brown from many obligations governing the average fictional detective. He need not arrest, detain, destroy, or even uncover the murderer to anyone but us. He does not feel himself responsible for any class’s protection. (The sin Brown finds in himself first and the culprit second, he has no trouble finding in accepted society as well.) His sole concern is the villain’s spiritual state. Repeatedly he submits himself to fatigue and danger (what else can he do?) in order to offer a man the opportunity of penitence—in other words, the opportunity to rejoin the community of grace as he, Father Brown, has joined the community of crime.

This exchange of roles embodies the Christian pattern. Christ became our sin that we might become his righteousness. No sinner is to be condemned, destroyed, exulted over. He is to be identified with, persuaded, won; quicunque vult. If the pornography of moral indignation has sources in traditional detective stories, it is no inalienable ingredient of them. Their point is reason and justice. Its chief stimulus is social anxiety, the fear that drives one social level to dehumanize another in order to justify its efforts to protect itself. Behind this is the impulse to project one’s pain and one’s sense of moral responsibility onto someone else; he is responsible, not I—let him suffer, not me. Allowing this, we would be rejecting Christian charity. The kingdom of grace is only for those who by grace accept their own responsibility for what hurts and disgusts them.

Pharisaism also coarsens the detective story. This is not equivalent with rejecting charity; but the coincidence of the two errors is interesting. As Father Brown himself might have said, rejecting the highest good ultimately means rejecting a host of lesser, simply wholesome goods as well.

LIONEL BASNEY

Lionel Basney is associate professor of English at Houghton College, Houghton, New York.

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