(A financier goes missing and a lookalike is found dead in a bathtub. The easygoing Lord Peter Wimsey searches for the connection.)
Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey, from the 1970s BBC miniseries (www.popmatters.com)
As troubling as murder is in our society, more of them happen on bookstore shelves than anywhere else, and millions of apparently peaceful people pay plenty of money to read about them, as if it were a pity that they don’t happen more often. I have casually wondered why. Probably it is an example of entertainment by extremity: if conflict is the heart of any good story, surely lots of people will go for people killing each other, since you can’t get more conflictual than that. This doesn’t really answer the question, though—it just passes the buck from fascination with murder to fascination with conflict in general. But of course we humans are inherently scenario-building, personality-scrutinizing, lie-detecting social beings. Human success has always depended on figuring other people out. The fact that one of the characters in such stories is likely to be the murderer is probably a large part of the draw. Trying to solve a murder mystery flexes the same mental muscles that we use for everyday social problem-solving and monitoring. And a murder is, again, more likely to catch our attention than any other breach of social mores. The authors make the stakes so high to ensure our attention. Not everyone goes in for these books, of course, which is simply because our society provides us with a variety of different ways to address basic human concerns. Take an EEG of a video gamer, sports follower, or romance reader at their respective hobbies; I suspect they are scratching the same itches in different ways.
(A white South African family in danger of racial violence flees to a village under the protection of their black servant.)
Luke Kgatitsoe at His House, Magopa, Ventersdorp District, Western Transvaal, 1986 (photo by David Goldblatt). This photograph is in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
You like to have some cup of tea?—
She runs.
This is the novel. Rather, between these two lines lies the novel, and these two (the first and last lines) are the tail ends of two realities that rest on either side of the novel and overlap within it. The pre-novel reality is a comfortable family in South Africa under apartheid, served by a black man July (I almost wrote “Friday”), “as his kind has always done for their kind”. The post-novel reality is an unwritten future, a frenzied sprint to the unknown, where the white mother, in some ways the central figure of the family, flees either to her violent death or to her salvation. Which of these she finds is not known, was not written, never came to pass. The novel is not about an ending, and so this is not a spoiler. The novel is about the boiling metamorphosis in process. As the novel’s epigraph by Antonio Gramsci indicates, the goal is to portray the “morbid symptoms” of a time when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. The first line is the old that is dying, and the last line is the failing-to-be-born of the new. In a terseness and simplicity of prose not unlike that of her countryman Alan Paton, the eventual Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer unwraps the space between these two lines, guiding us through the development from one into the other.
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July’s People
May 25, 2014 / Leave a comment
Nadine Gordimer
1981
(A white South African family in danger of racial violence flees to a village under the protection of their black servant.)
You like to have some cup of tea?—
She runs.
This is the novel. Rather, between these two lines lies the novel, and these two (the first and last lines) are the tail ends of two realities that rest on either side of the novel and overlap within it. The pre-novel reality is a comfortable family in South Africa under apartheid, served by a black man July (I almost wrote “Friday”), “as his kind has always done for their kind”. The post-novel reality is an unwritten future, a frenzied sprint to the unknown, where the white mother, in some ways the central figure of the family, flees either to her violent death or to her salvation. Which of these she finds is not known, was not written, never came to pass. The novel is not about an ending, and so this is not a spoiler. The novel is about the boiling metamorphosis in process. As the novel’s epigraph by Antonio Gramsci indicates, the goal is to portray the “morbid symptoms” of a time when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. The first line is the old that is dying, and the last line is the failing-to-be-born of the new. In a terseness and simplicity of prose not unlike that of her countryman Alan Paton, the eventual Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer unwraps the space between these two lines, guiding us through the development from one into the other.
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