A N D T H E M E T R O P O L I T A N S U B L I M E
G L E N N W . M O S T
I begin with some numbers. In 1656 the largest city in western Europe was Naples, with 360,000 inhabitants; but an outbreak of plague that year devastated the city, reducing its population to about half that number, and it did not regain the same level until a century later. At that time, in the mid-eighteenth century, London was approximately twice that size, with 700,000 inhabitants, and by 1801 London had become the first European city to reach the level of about 1 million inhabitants that Rome had attained in the first and second centuries a.d., at the height of its power, before
dwindling to a twentieth of that size in the Middle Ages. Through-out the nineteenth century London’s population expanded rapidly: by 1841 it had doubled to almost 2 million; forty years later, by 1881, it had doubled again to almost 4 million. Paris’s development began from a smaller starting point but expanded no less rapidly. In 1801 it was half the size of London, with 500,000 inhabitants. By 1871 this figure had almost quadrupled to 1.8 million. Only eight years later, in 1879, it had reached 2.2 million, and by the end of the century Paris had more than 2.5 million inhabitants.
quacious. They indicate that one aspect of the process of modern-ization undergone by European societies since the beginning of the nineteenth century has been a rapid and thorough urbaniza-tion. Within a few short generations, Europe was transformed from a largely rural society in which most people lived in small villages or towns into an increasingly industrial and metropolitan society in which more and more people lived in a single capital city. The increase in population in all major European cities dur-ing the nineteenth century is far too rapid and drastic to be expli-cable solely in terms of redistricting patterns or of local birth rates, especially taking into account the frequency of infant dysentery and the regular outbreaks of cholera, influenza, and other diseases that killed millions of people well into the twentieth century. Rather, it must have been due in large measure to the influx into the city of young people and families in search of new economic opportunities. Throughout Europe, beginning around 1800, mil-lions abandoned the countryside in which their families had often lived for centuries, pursuing the same or closely related occupa-tions generation after generation, and they came to the big city.
new professions, trying to get ahead of their rivals by contacts, shrewdness, and any other available means. Large, threatening, seemingly incomprehensible, a source of danger at least as much as of salvation, the nineteenth-century big city presented itself to its fascinated and anxious spectator-participants as what we may term the metropolitan sublime, no less disquieting than the natural sublime that had so fascinated the eighteenth century.
Beyond the staggeringly inhuman vastness of the natural sub-lime, the Enlightenment had always sensed the mystery of God’s power; and even through the artistic sublime that formed its civi-lized counterpart, the voice that seemed to speak was not merely human but was inspired and hence authorized by a transcendent instance. In this way the very awesomeness of the sublime could come to seem consoling in the eighteenth century: we ourselves might not fully understand the divine plan that it concealed, and as individuals we might even end up being crushed by it, but we could not doubt for a moment that there was indeed such a plan and that what it intended was our good. But what were the city-dwellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to do with the new Tower of Babel that confronted them as the metropolitan sublime? The great cities were too secular, too human, too profane in all ways for their inhabitants to be able to conceive of them on the model of divine sublimity; yet to abandon the attempt to understand them altogether would mean to succumb to a poten-tially devastating conceptual and ethical nihilism. So the search for mystery continued: yet now the mysteries that could be sought after were no longer divine, transcendent, and benevolent but human, concealed – and therefore inevitably evil. And if the natu-ral sublime could yield consolation even when it was not fully understood (for are not the ways of God ultimately hidden even to the pious soul?), the metropolitan sublime could console its anx-ious victims only if, and to the degree that, they could penetrate and understand it.
Life in the city was an epistemological adventure, exciting but risky – and it could become a matter of life and death.
indi-cates as much. Under the surface of Paris lie hidden vast subterra-nean depths to which only the expert eye of the author has full access. Sue’s Paris is a city not of one big divine mystery (his novel is not entitled The Mystery of Paris) but of countless small and all-too-human ones. Every character in it has a secret, a past he or she is anxious to conceal, an identity based on either a falsehood or a crime or, usually, both. Even Rodolphe, the humorlessly moralis-tic protagonist, has been driven into the role of judge and execu-tioner by his guilty conscience for his youthful sins. All the charac-ters are linked by webs of association, complicity, and passion of which they themselves are often unaware. In the end the frustra-tion of not only some of the most evil designs but also of almost all of Rodolphe’s noble projects leaves the reader who stands outside the fiction with a sense of the inescapable tragedy of the social spiderweb in which all the figures are helplessly trapped and with the impression that he and the author alone recognize clearly its true nature – a consolation denied everyone within its fictional world. The characters cannot escape the past and themselves, and often the discovery of the hidden truth has lethal consequences. Rodolphe’s attempt to undo the past goes aground on the inabil-ity of his rediscovered daughter, Fleur-de-Marie, to forget that she was once a prostitute, for her guilty conscience drives her first into a cloister and then to her death. But we as readers thereby learn a cautionary wisdom: that in Sue’s Paris as in our own there is a mortal secret concealed at the heart of everyone and that every concealment is inexorably punished by an eventual revelation.
In Sue, that secret almost always involves a death or a falsehood or both, and it exerts a fascination which under certain circum-stances can take on an irresistibly erotic dimension. This is also one of the lessons of Charles Baudelaire’s great sonnet ‘‘À une passante’’ (‘‘To a Woman Passing By’’) published just fifteen years after Sue’s novel:
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant, Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan, La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
[The deafening street around me roared. Long, slender, in full mourning, majestic grief, A woman passed by, with an ostentatious hand Raising, swinging her festoon and hem;
Agile and noble, with a statue’s leg.
As for me, contorted like someone extravagant, I drank In her eye, a livid sky where the hurricane germinates, The sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash . . . then the night! – Fleeting beauty Whose glance made me suddenly be reborn,
Will I never see you again except in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you fled, you do not know where I am going,
O you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it!]
other in this way. Against the loud and undi√erentiated back-ground of the crowded street, the woman appears in isolated splendor almost as a divine epiphany: her own Apollonian grace and solemnity turn the poet who encounters her into the opposite, a Dionysian maenad, a bacchant who drinks a superhuman and deadly inspiration from her celestial eyes. She is certainly a figure of the poetic Muse who inspires literary fictions (romantic and Romantic ones), such as, for example, this very poem, a carefully constructed and memorable verbal artifact that opposes yet also captures the inarticulate and ephemeral screams of the modern urban street. Unsurprisingly, Baudelaire interprets her in radically erotic terms as well, in a tradition of male poets and their female Muses that goes back at least to the Latin elegists – ‘‘You ask me whence I write so many love poems, / Whence my book comes softly to the lips. / It is not Calliope, not Apollo who sings them for me. / My girlfriend herself creates my poetic talent’’ (Propertius 2.1.1–4).
popu-late Baudelaire’s melancholy imagination: ‘‘I think of my great swan . . . / . . . and then of you, / Andromache . . . / I think of the Negress . . . / Of whoever has lost what cannot be found again, / Never, never! . . . / . . . of many, many other s!’’ (‘‘The Swan’’). What could possibly be more seductive for the poet of the metropolitan sublime?
slums of Detroit. And yet, for all their crime and detection, her novels seem to be exercises in ratiocination and ingenuity, and to belong more to the category of riddles or crossword puzzles rather than providing the kinds of deeper anxieties and satisfactions that many readers of detective fiction seem to crave. We may consider her an eloquent counter-example, an important exception who proves the general rule that detective novels tend instead to favor the metropolis.
For Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin is inseparable from Paris, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes from London, Georges Simenon’s Maigret from Paris again, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer from Los Angeles – to name only these. Or to reverse the direction of inference: for many of us, the image of these cities is deeply influenced by the detective fictions set in them that we have read. Indeed, one sure sign of a town’s graduation to the status of a world-class city is that detective fic-tions can finally come to be set in it – think in recent years of Pa-tricia Cornwell’s Richmond, Virginia, of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, or of Alexander McCall Smith’s Gaborone, Botswana. Some recent crime novels, which regard the deceptions and duplicity of urban political and economic power structures with such fashionably deep suspicion that they must abandon the city at some point in their plots in order to seek out a hidden truth that can be uncovered only in the wilderness, furnish only a partial counter-example – partial for here, too, the metropolis is an indispensable starting point and ultimate frame of reference. Thus in Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park (1981), Arkady Renko’s dogged investigation of a brutal triple murder in an amusement park in Russia’s largest city leads him through the blazing peat-bogs of Shatura to a bloody climax in the desolate wastelands of northern New Jersey; while in Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), Smilla’s obsti-nate refusal to accept an easy explanation for the death of a young boy in Denmark’s capital eventually obliges her to embark on a dangerous voyage through the North Atlantic that culminates (or, alas, unravels) on an island o√ the coast of Greenland.
Indeed, the big city o√ers the writer and reader of detective fiction so many advantages that it is not hard to understand why these two phenomena have so often coincided.
provides an inexhaustible supply of colorful persons and striking incidents and thereby permits the novelist to explore his or her characters and their society not only in a single story but in a series of novels and tales. Conan Doyle’s or Simenon’s lengthy series of stories could only have been set in a small village if a series of murders, each the object of a single tale, had bit by bit decimated it, indeed annihilated it – which would have been intrinsically implausible and would have had the added inconvenience of awk-wardly reducing the number of possible suspects. That is, detective fiction requires not only a detective, a criminal, and one or more victims but also and above all lots of survivors (who in certain regards represent us readers), and obviously the big city has far more of these to o√er than any small town can. A series of stories like those about Holmes or Maigret gives its readers as a whole a rounded and fascinating portrait of the detective and his associ-ates, a catalogue of a large range of more or less criminal, more or less innocent characters, and a gradually evolving depiction of the London or Paris in which they have all been engaged for so many years. And yet various alternatives to the big city or the small village as the scene for crime fiction can easily be conceived. The simplest is the constantly varied locale, as in Christie’s Hercule Poirot series – though in this case the striking character of the detective must bear the burden of supplying the unity and con-tinuity of interest that variety of locale cannot. All in all, the detective does indeed seem to work best in a big city – especially when he figures in a series of stories and not just in one. But we do not yet seem quite to have understood either why the detective prefers the metropolis, nor why detective stories tend to come in series rather than individually.
unpredict-able urban setting that posed his talents such a challenge, it did not take long for the tradition represented above all by Agatha Christie and her followers (like Ruth Rendell in the Inspector Wexford series) to recognize that the degree of di≈culty of the puzzle was largely independent of the number of possible suspects or could even vary inversely to it. Already the cast of ten in Christie’s And Then There Were None (first published as Ten Little Niggers, 1939) was more than complicated enough for most readers – and in that example the characters were sequestered in a mansion on an otherwise uninhabited island, like especially re-markable laboratory specimens whose purity must be preserved from contamination. Even in the lengths to which their host, the mysterious U. N. Owen, must go in that novel in order to isolate his victims from contact with the outside world, we can sense the pressures of the big city from which they are being surgically separated.
A hint toward explaining more satisfactorily the link between the big city and detective fiction is provided by the fact that it is this setting that most sharply separates modern detective stories from their pre-modern predecessors. Of course, murders are com-mitted and murderers are apprehended throughout world litera-ture, in Oedipus the King, in Hamlet, in many other pre-modern texts: yet in these older cases the city plays no role, or only a marginal one, and in essence what we find is a family or court intrigue working its way to a catastrophic conclusion. At the be-ginning of Sophocles’ play, the chorus of citizens does indeed ask Oedipus for help against the plague, but the crime he investigates turns out to involve only himself and his immediate family (and, of course, in a certain sense, all of us). By contrast, in the first modern detective story, E. T. A. Ho√mann’s Mlle de Scudéri
Ho√-mann lingers with relish on the details of the terrifying e√ects of these crimes on the city’s numberless and nameless inhabitants:
The Parisians breathed a sign of relief at being rescued from the monster that had been able to direct its secret, murderous weapons with impunity against friend and foe. But soon it was reported that the terrifying arts of the accursed La Croix had found a new heir. Like an invisible, malevolent spirit, murder sneaked into the most intimate circles that family – love – friendship were capable of forming, and rapidly and infallibly it seized the unhappy victims. The man who was seen today in blooming health tottered around the next day sick and frail, and the doctors’ greatest skill could not save him from death. Wealth – a lucrative position – a beautiful, perhaps too young wife – that was enough to be hounded to death. The most terrible distrust sundered the holiest bonds. The husband trembled at his wife – the father at his son – the sister at her brother. – The food, the wine remained untasted at the meal which one friend gave to others, and where once pleasure and games had ruled, wild glances spied after the concealed murderer. Fathers of families were seen fearfully buying groceries in distant locations and cooking them themselves in some filthy rented kitchen, fearing dia-bolical treachery in their own home. And yet the greatest, most watchful caution was often fruitless.
An extraordinary recent novel by Fred Vargas, Pars vite et re-viens tard (2001; Have Mercy on Us All, 2003), re-activates all these elements in the same setting of metropolitan Paris – ‘‘the capital of the nineteenth century’’ (Walter Benjamin) – of which the detective novel has always been especially fond. Vargas re-creates persuasively the capricious, intuitive, and charismatic in-vestigator, his sturdy, systematic, loyal, and rather obtuse assistant, the inexplicable series of murders, and above all the gradually gathering storm clouds of hysterical terror that convulse the baf-fled urban population. But she contributes to the traditional for-mula, not only an astonishing humor and a poetic sensitivity to the nuances of the French language and the tremors of the human heart, but above all an archaeologist’s sense of the temporal strat-ification of any culture, its ironic sedimentation of very di√erent historical experiences in immediate and troubling juxtaposition to one another. In most of Vargas’s detective novels, it is the very survival of antiquated modes of life into a modernity that has tried in vain to forget them that produces the most memorably uncanny e√ects. The corpse of the murder victim, surrounded by survivors who cannot bring themselves to avert their fascinated gaze and investigated by a detective who still believes, rather quaintly, that the only way society can endure into the future is to come to terms with the crimes of its past, is for Vargas the emblem of a funda-mental anachronism that may be typical of all cultures but is manifested most cruelly in the modern metropolis. ‘‘The old Paris is no longer (a city’s form / Changes more quickly, alas!, than a mortal’s heart)’’ (‘‘The Swan’’).
The city dwellers’ horrified fear at the crime that has been com-mitted among them makes them revert to an extreme form of the general malaise that had always characterized the city in its con-trast with the pre-modern village – atomism, distrust, individual-ism, apprehension, anxiety, the weakening of all the bonds of family and friendship – and that until then only a veneer of habit had covered up.
For this nameless and hence insurmountable urban dread, the detective story o√ers not only a radical heightening but also expla-nation, resolution, and solace. The author, like his or her stand-in, the detective, reveals himself to be an unsurpassed expert in all the tiniest details of the big city: he knows its streets and neigh-borhoods, its rules and exceptions, its language and customs; give him an address, and he can tell you exactly where it is – but also exactly what kind of people live there, how they earn their money, and what their most secret dreams and vices are. The crime is not only a disruption of urban patterns with which his experience and intelligence, but above all his many years of life in the city, make him intimately familiar; it is also itself part of a larger pattern of violence and brutality of which he is a connoisseur.
city he has no di≈culty in masquerading as one of them if he wishes. We might find this idea disquieting, yet in the traditional detective novel the detective is on the side of the angels or at least is rather more so than the criminals are. Perhaps he is a secular version of our guardian angel, protecting us not only from villains but also from ourselves.
Classic European and American detective fiction tended to dif-fer from each other in many regards, at least until the thorough-going Americanization of European culture that marked the sec-ond half of the twentieth century, and the di√erences are no less evident in the role the big city plays in the two traditions.
The European detective is at home in his city: he admires the order his knowledge of it reveals to him, and he is relieved to restore it to that order by solving the crimes he regards as regret-table and remediable exceptions, however frequent they may be-come. We might say that he is first and foremost a city-lover and only secondarily a detective; he happens to work as a detective, and this is one way he declares his love for the city he lives in. Sherlock Holmes’s London adventures tend to be entrusted above all to the form of short stories: each one resolves satisfactorily an isolated perturbation; the city is a necessary setting for the mortal inci-dents but is not complicitous in them or deeply altered by them, and in ‘‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’’ in a famously paradoxical conversation in a train bound for the countryside, Holmes can even correct the naive error of Watson (and no doubt of many readers), who believes that the countryside is more peace-ful than the city – Holmes sees the very press of the ubiquitous urban crowd as a deterrent to crime and an aid for its solution, and he shudders to think of the horrors committed in the uncontrolled, isolated country house.
that rubs against his obsessive dedication to his work but in fact helps him to understand better the victims and the criminals he must deal with:
The little black car from the Criminal Police crossed the Place de la République and Maigret found himself in his own district, a network of narrow streets, heavily populated, bounded by the Boulevard Voltaire on one side and the Bou-levard Richard-Lenoir on the other.
Madame Maigret and he walked along these little streets each time they went to the Pardons’ for dinner, and Madame Maigret often did her shopping on the Rue du Chemin-Vert. It was at Gino’s, as it was called familiarly, that she bought not only pasta but mortadella, prosciutto, and olive oil in large, golden-colored cans. The shops were narrow, deep, and badly lit. Today, because of the lowering sky, the street lights were on almost everywhere, making a false daylight that gave people’s faces a waxy appearance.
Lots of old women. Many old men, too, alone, a marketing basket in their hands. Resignation on their faces. Some stopped from time to time and put their hand to their heart, waiting for a spasm to stop.
Women of all nationalities, carrying young children, a slightly older boy or girl hanging on to their dresses. [ Mai-gret and the Killer]
that he and we can tell the di√erence between them). The Ameri-can detective’s automobile brings him from the darkest slums to the glittering mansions and back: and the lesson he learns in his circuitous travels is always the same one, that there is no wealth except what has been stolen, no poverty except the result of theft, no murder except to cover up some other crime, no victim wholly innocent, and no murderer comfortingly distinguishable from the police, the detective, from you and from me. Paris may be built on sweat: Los Angeles is built on blood. In the end, the American city is not only the scene of the crime: it is the very crime.
In both traditions of detective fiction, but especially in the American one that has become increasingly dominant within the past half-century in Europe too, the big city presents itself with features characteristic of modernity as a whole. Urban dread is one particularly acute form of a greater social and psychological mal-aise that one does not have to live in a big city to experience and is typical of a culture that has lost its traditional anchoring in pre-modern religious and philosophical certainties and discovers itself now with no more secure foundations than its own fragile sense of infinitely contestable values. The big city is not only a specifically modern product: it is also an emblem of modernity, cut o√ from its traditional roots but haunted by their traces. For almost two cen-turies, the literary form in which the big city has most often chosen to mirror itself has been that other typical product and emblem of modernity, the detective story. In the crimes it sala-ciously describes we sense all the fascinated dread of modernity – and in the solutions it almost never fails to supply, the sour nostal-gia for a pre-modern security.
Perhaps the tension between these two contradictory tem-poralities helps explain why detective stories tend to generate series, for they obsessively re-enact a compulsive Da-Fort alterna-tion of the sort Freud identified in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
terms redeems and makes tolerable, indeed pleasurable, the for-mer one: so let there be evil, indeed, abundant, vicious, and graphic – but only as flowers of evil.
