total action

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that the epic as a genre is characterized by what he calls “total action” (318). The total action of a story begins with the initiation of the conflict and ends with its resolution — but the epic poem does not straightforwardly tell this whole story.

For instance, the total action of the Iliad begins with the Judgment of Paris, and it ends … well, it’s a bit difficult to say exactly where it ends. In one view of the matter, it ends when Troy falls; in another, it ends when when the major participants in the story have concluded their part in it. You could argue that the total action of the Iliad is not complete — and certainly the total action of the Odyssey is not complete — until Odysseus has performed penance assigned to him by Athena (building an altar to Poseidon in a place where that god had previously been unknown) and returned to Ithaca — his final homecoming. But in any case, the concept as Frye develops it, suggests that no epic will narrate its total action. It will zero in on something essential, perhaps the pivotal moment in the whole tale. So however you would describe the total action of the Iliad, the poem itself narrates just a few days in the long Trojan War: the days in which Achilles withdraws from the fighting, which leads to the death of Patroclus, which leads to Achilles’s re-entry into the battle, which leads to the death of Hector, which leads to the fall of Troy, since the city has now lost its great champion and the inspiration of its warriors.

The total action of the Aeneid is something vaster. You could argue, if you wanted to see things from Virgil’s point of view, that it extends from the Judgment of Paris ever onward, because the Pax Romana is the culmination of all history. (No, Virgil, no.) But the action of the poem itself begins with Aeneas’s escape from a burning Troy and ends in Italy with his killing of Turnus in battle.

In short: “total action” is a useful concept, and it seems to me that it is not relevant only to epics. Of the other genres of narrative, the one to which the concept of total action is most relevant is, it seems to me, the detective story, and more particularly the murder mystery. The total action of any murder mystery begins when the conflict that leads to the murder begins. When was that first seed planted? Perhaps it was when Aunt Mabel chose to give all of her money to your cousin instead of you; or the first time that Walter flirted with his married neighbor, Isobel. And it ends — well, again, that can be hard to say, but in societies that have the death penalty, the terminus ad quem of the total action is the execution of the convicted criminal. (Matters are less fully resolved when a murderer might eventually be released from prison.)

But however you think about it, murder mysteries, like epics, rarely seek to encompass the total action of the story. Often we do get the the terminus a quo, the initiation of the conflict, typically through backstory: it’s the kind of thing discovered along the way by the investigators, whoever they happen to be. But the terminus ad quem may be anticipated without being narrated. So, for instance, it’s quite common for a a murder mystery to end with the arrest of the murderer. We imagine the conviction and imprisonment and possibly the execution of the criminal as things that will happen as a matter of course. We don’t need to read all the details.

But if W. H. Auden’s view of what the murder mystery is all about — articulated in his famous but very bad 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage” — is correct even in broad outlines, then the novel can’t really stop before the arrest of the criminal. And that’s because in Auden’s view, the murder mystery is fundamentally a consoling revision of the story of Eden. It begins with a healthy (Auden would, wrongly, say “innocent”) community; that community is then profoundly disrupted by a killing; and what must happen in the course of the story is a restoration of the community’s orderly health. And that restoration of order is something that only happens if the criminal is captured, is identified, arrested, and convicted. “The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.”

A small note en passant: In G. K. Chesterton’s stories we only sometimes see the arrest of the criminal Father Brown has identified, but that’s not because Chesterton is uninterested in the restoration of innocence. However, the innocence Father Brown wants to see restored is that in the conscience of the criminal. He doesn’t especially care about whether a criminal goes to jail, but he is passionately concerned to prevent the criminal from going to Hell. Confession and absolution restore a sinner to right relation with God, which is arguably more important that the kinds of restoration that many murder mysteries are concerned with. Arguably. Auden seems to accept the point, because he finds Father Brown to be one of the few wholly successful detectives.

In any case, if the restorative arc Auden describes is necessary to the murder mystery, then something funny is going on in the later mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers — the exception being her final one, Busman’s Honeymoon, which for certain specific reasons, perhaps to be discussed in another post, takes the story all the way to the execution of the criminal. That makes it very different than the other late novels, which I will have to describe in some detail. So if you haven’t read those stories, stop reading this post and go read them instead. They’re very much worth reading, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. I’ll say as little as I can about the details, but

SO MANY SPOILERS COMING

Consider Have His Carcase (1932), her eighth Lord Peter Wimsey novel and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It’s quite a long novel, the longest that Sayers had written up until that point. It begins with Harriet, holidaying on England’s South Coast, discovering a dead man lying on a large rock at the seaside; we don’t see Lord Peter until the fourth chapter. In the final chapter, Lord Peter — working with Harriet, but he’s the one who stitches together the evidence — discovers who murdered the man, and also how, why, and when they did it. The whole shebang. But he and Harriet are then told by the local police inspector that if he tells the story to the Chief Constable, the Chief Constable may very well not believe it, or, even if he does believe it, may think a conviction sufficiently unlikely that prosecution is not worth seeking. In response, Peter and Harriet give up the whole situation as hopeless and return to London. The End.

So we never learn whether the murderers are convicted. We don’t even learn whether they’re arrested. And what makes that a little more disconcerting is that the circumstances which led them to commit murder are still in place. The story centers on a man who feels that he will be cheated out of his inheritance, and drafts two others to help him kill the man he fears will get the money that’s rightfully his. But by the end of the story it’s strongly hinted that that another person could get the inheritance the murderer wants. So his motive for murder remains: if he’s not arrested and convicted we have no reason to believe that he won’t try again. If what readers want from a story is the restoration of a pre-murder innocence, or even some sense of justice imperfectly done, they’re not getting any of that from this novel.

Things are a little more complicated in The Nine Tailors (1934), because the great revelation in this case is that, while there is a dead man who gives every appearance of having been murdered, in fact he has not been. It is just possible that another man could have been accused of manslaughter in the case, or some other crime less serious than murder; but that man dies and therefore there’s nowhere for the story to go for resolution, at least the kind of resolution that Auden finds necessary. We are left with a feeling that the wheels of Justice have turned, that Nemesis has acted, and that the image or form of Nemesis is the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul; but all such matters are left to the imagination and the meditation of the reader. So we do, in a way, have the thing that Auden asked for, which is a restoration of of the moral order of the community. But it turns out that the moral order of this particular community was never actually disrupted in the way that it is when a member of a community is murdered by another member of the community.

And then in Gaudy Night (1935), once again, there is no murder. What we have at the end is the exposure of the person who is responsible for a good deal of illegal activity: vandalism, destruction of property, and at one point an attempted murder. (Also poison-pen letters, but while destructive of people’e peace of mind those may not be illegal — I’m not sure what British law was at that time.) When exposed, this person, far from regretting the attempted murder, declares that she wishes she could have murdered many people. But once more, Peter and Harriet at the end of a novel turn to their own personal interests, resolve the conflict that has kept them apart from each other. And what happens to the criminal is unknown: we are only told in the last chapter that “the problem is being medically dealt with,” which is frustratingly vague.

It’s frustrating primarily because, again, this person tried to commit murder and is only sorry that she failed. (The person she strangled was not the person she planned to strangle, but is among those she wishes to see dead.) So why is Sayers so reticent, or even evasive, on this key point?

One reason, I think is that the criminal is the mother of two young children, and it’s not at all clear what would become of those children if their mother were arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Saying that “the problem is being medically dealt with” is a way of preventing us from worrying too much about the kids. Sayers has other things she’s like for us to be thinking about, primarily the resolution of the complicated relationship between Peter and Harriet.

All this points to what I think is a serious problem with the construction of the plot. The criminal is obsessively concerned with the upbringing of her children — she thinks and talks constantly about them — but acts in ways that threaten to separate her from those children. She doesn’t think she’s going to be caught — criminals never think they’re going to be caught — but she knows that she could be caught, and if that happens then there’s a very good chance that she’ll never see her children again. She is to some extent irrational, but she’s not that irrational: for instance, she takes great pains to avoid being captured or identified. But she never ceases her campaign of hatred and violence; indeed she regularly escalates that campaign. Sayers never attempts to explain this radical incongruity. As I say, she’s interested in other things.

Sayers in her detective fiction is always interested in things other than the solution of the mystery. She often commented that her goal was to reconnect the tale of detection with the social novel, as she felt some of her 19th-century predecessors (especially Wilkie Colins) had done. In her novels she demonstrates a serious interest in the aftereffects of the Great War on returning soldiers, in the moral disorders of the aesthetic avant-garde, in the plight of the Superfluous Woman, in the sociology of women’s colleges, in the nature of good work, in the social consequences of modern advertising, in campanology and cryptography and cricket. And, of course, she was also interested in whether a highly intelligent and thoroughly independent woman can find happiness in marriage, and, if so, what a successful union might feel like, to both parties. The range of her curiosity is truly remarkable.

Now, those wide interests do not prevent her from working out her plots with great care. Except for The Five Red Herrings she didn’t do puzzle-novels in the vein of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr, but the details could be intricate, and she took pride in following, seriously if not always meticulously, the rules of the Detection Club, of which she was a founding member. It was just that her accountability to her fictional world ended, she thought, when she had provided a satisfactory solution to an appropriately challenging mystery. In writing Have His Carcase Sayers thought it necessary to have Lord Peter figure out whodunnit — who and how and why. But that’s where her responsibilities as a writer of mysteries ended.

It’s interesting, I believe, that this was also Harriet Vane’s view. In Busman’s Honeymoon we’re told that Harriet’s detective novels proceed thus:

Miss Harriet Vane, in those admirable detective novels with which she was accustomed to delight the hearts of murder-fans, usually made a point of finishing off on the top-note. Mr. Robert Templeton, that famous though eccentric sleuth, would unmask his murderer with a flourish of panache in the last chapter and retire promptly from the stage amid a thunder of applause, leaving somebody else to cope with the trivial details of putting the case together.

That very novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, though, carries the story right to the end of the total action: the execution of the murderer — as though to compensate for the abrupt conclusions of the other late novels. But if the community itself is in any way healed, we don’t learn about it. In its different way, this novel is as irresolute as its predecessors.

Sayers did not seem to think that she owed it to the society imagined her her books to provide the kind of restoration of moral order that Auden felt necessary. As her career as a novelist went on, she was less and less concerned to provide comfort and reassurance, and more and more eager to see the incursion of crime into a community as a kind of apocalypse, that is, an unveiling or revelation of the conflicts — social, psychological, moral, spiritual — that we generally do a good job of not seeing. Auden did not think that this was the kind of thing the true detective novel does well, or should even attempt to do, which is probably why he did not like her books. Your mileage, however, may vary. Mine certainly does.