Toward an abstract.

Because, you know, the due date is May 23rd.

First revision of the most recent abstract paragraph:

The artist-investigator, the inheritor of the worlds of Chambers and Lovecraft, amplifies the powers of the traditional investigator, permitting him to access the world of the criminal through the aesthetics of the crime. These aesthetics must be explicated by one who recognizes and understands what the criminal has constructed via the event and the crime scene. Without this insight into the criminal's sensitivities, motives, and actions--which form the core of an aesthetic--the community cannot be redeemed, its freedom cannot be purchased, because the criminal will not be caught. Thus, the aesthetic of redemption is available only via the artist-investigator. This new kind of investigator, combining elements of the traditional investigator with a vision shaped by the aesthetics of crime and redemption, places the first season of True Detective firmly in the weird fiction tradition.

But that's not really an abstract, is it. It's an opening paragraph for a chapter, or perhaps an abstract for a chapter. 

Now, to make it into an abstract:

The figure of the detective, or investigator, has been a contentious one. Born out of traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the figure changed radically in 20th century detective fiction and continues to do so today. The term "artist-investigator" has typically been used to describe someone working in the arts to push the boundaries of what is currently known. It is not typically used to describe an epistemology of investigation. In this paper, I review the work laid down by both Chambers, author of The King in Yellow, and HP Lovecraft through the lens of detective fiction tropes and conventions, showing how the investigators in True Detective are a new kind of detective derived from both weird fiction and detective fiction. This new character is based on the aesthetics of crime and redemption, pitting the artistic sensibilities of the detective and the criminal against each other. In so doing, this paper sheds new light on the little-recognized issue of the artist-investigator.

That's a first draft, no revision. I'll let it simmer overnight and work on it more tomorrow.

 

 

 

So here's the idea.

From the outline post:

Full paragraph of thesis idea, induced by Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature": The artist-investigator is the theme uniting Chambers, Lovecraft, and True Detective. For Chambers, Lovecraft, and the writers of True Detective, the artist amplifies the powers of the investigator, changing the aesthetic of both the artist and the investigator and permitting the investigator to understand his entrance into the world of the criminal. (50)

Through the combination of the artist and the investigator, Chambers, Lovecraft, and the writers of True Detective place the first season firmly in the weird fiction tradition. (51)

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The aesthetic of redemption needs to go in here somewhere. I'm working in inventor's notebook No. 2. 

--

The artist-investigator is the theme uniting Chambers, Lovecraft, and True Detective. For Chambers, Lovecraft, and the writers of True Detective, the artist amplifies the powers of the investigator, changing the aesthetic of both the artist and the investigator and permitting the investigator to understand his entrance into the world of the criminal.  Through the combination of the artist and the investigator, Chambers, Lovecraft, and the writers of True Detective place the first season firmly in the weird fiction tradition. The aesthetic of redemption in True Detective is available only via the artist-investigator. Without the artist-investigator, the community cannot be redeemed through the capture of the criminal. The aesthetic of the crime has to be investigated by someone who can recognize and understand the aesthetic; this is the artist-investigator. Only an artist-investigator, in the tradition of Chambers and Lovecraft, can catch Errol Childress.

--

Man, this thesis sorting stuff is messy and recursive.

--

The artist-investigator, a figure evolved from the work of Chambers and Lovecraft, amplifies the powers of the investigator, permitting the investigator to access the world of the criminal through the aesthetic of the crime. In addition to the aesthetic of crime, the aesthetic of redemption is available only via the artist-investigator. The aesthetic of the crime must be investigated by someone who can recognize and understand the aesthetic the criminal has constructed via the event and the crime scene. Without this understanding, the community cannot be redeemed, its freedom cannot be purchased, because the criminal cannot be caught. This new kind of investigator, combining the artist and the investigator through the aesthetics of crime and redemption, places the first season of True Detective firmly in the weird fiction tradition. 

--

Hrm. That might work.

Is there an aesthetics of redemption?

Yes, I quite agree. That's one of my typically oddball questions.

If there's an aesthetics of crime, and my reading in the area so far indicates that there very much is (see, eg, critical works on Oscar Wilde by Simon Joyce), then surely there's an aesthetics of investigation and an aesthetics of redemption.

Such speculations about the Ripper's identity--and his presumed resemblance to other literary figures--suggest a renewed interest in crime as not only imaginative and aesthetic, but as the province of the privileged classes.... (Joyce 502-503)

By any modern measure, Errol Childress does not lead a privileged life. In fact, the interior of his home is in dramatic contrast to the homes of Hart--both the one he shares with his eventual ex-wife and later his apartment--and of Cohle. Childress may live on a family compound, but everything is in disrepair, dirty, cluttered, and likely many other things associated with poverty. He is both an owner of many possessions and an owner of nothing of value. Despite this, he is a member of a privileged class because of his blood relationship to the Tuttle family. He is protected by them, and perhaps even elevated through the cult. In True Detective, privilege is not limited to money or what are essentially middle-class values of thrift, industry, and moral rectitude.

Aesthetics. Αισθητική.

The work of the investigator is essentially restorative and preservative. With a successful investigation, the detective restores order and preserves the status quo. Interestingly, there is a corresponding set of values for design:

1. Archaeological perspective: preserve history
2. Artistic perspective: preserve the beautiful
3. Social perspective: preserve the familiar

The investigator does all three of these as well. Via the investigation, he preserves the history of events. By investigating and resolving the investigation, he preserves the beautiful (there is also an argument that by codifying the investigation and cataloging evidence, the detective preserves the beauty of the crime and crime scene). By catching the criminal, he enables society to preserve what's familiar and rid itself of what is dangerous and unknown.

Yet the question has been asked: If a murder is artistically beautiful, can it exist outside of moral considerations? As an aside, this is essentially what Nietzsche asked us to do when he described things as being beyond good and evil.

The criminal and the investigator have competing aesthetic and artistic visions. The criminal sees his crime as a masterpiece and himself as an artist. The investigator sees himself as solving crimes as an artistic/intellectual pastime. The crime itself is only a masterpiece in the investigator's eyes if it reaches a certain level of aesthetics. Thus, the investigator is the critic, the criminal is the artist, and the crime/crime scene is the aesthetic scene.

Lots more to think about with regard to this.

Lordy. It may be outline time.

I'm at the point where I need to start writing more connected prose. I've got a ton of things written, just none of them in any form that links one to the other.

Historically, I am not a big fan of outlines, largely because I create them, start writing, then shift the outline content around so much that it's unrecognizable. But maybe that's what outlines are for, right? Dismemberment.

So here goes. 

Introduction: I don't even know where to begin with this.

Part I: Tropes and Metafiction

Part II: Chambers and the Artist as Investigator

Part III: Detective Fiction

Part IV: Lovecraft and True Detective

Part V: The Artist-Investigator

Conclusion

And here's the list of everything I have in my inventor's notebook #2 that is labeled "thesis idea." Page numbers in parentheses.

The artist as anti-hero (37)
The necessary death of the investigator (38)
The self-erasing investigator; the investigator without a self; the death of the investigator (38)
Chambers, Lovecraft, and the new ethos of True Detective (38)
Chambers, Lovecraft, and True Detective's Impossible Intrusions (41)
Full paragraph of thesis idea, induced by Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature": The artist-investigator is the theme uniting Chambers, Lovecraft, and True Detective. For Chambers, Lovecraft, and the writers of True Detective, the artist amplifies the powers of the investigator, changing the aesthetic of both the artist and the investigator and permitting the investigator to understand his entrance into the world of the criminal. (50)

Through the combination of the artist and the investigator, Chambers, Lovecraft, and the writers of True Detective place the first season firmly in the weird fiction tradition. (51)

The simultaneity of eldritch horror and human reality is Lovecraft's specialty, and its translation in True Detective follows both detective fiction and weird fiction conventions. (59-60)

Looks like I have some that are useful as chapter thesis ideas and some that can safely be tossed after the rest are used.

Seriously, I've got so much material, I don't know where to start. This likely means that I should return to writing by hand, which is how I figure things out best. 

Who is the true detective?

This may be the first question asked of the audience via the title. Who is this guy? Who's this true detective? Is this a reference to some lurid tabloid filled with fiction disguised as true crime stories? Is it an actual person?

In tracking down some answers to this question, I was able to outline some of the key differences between Cohle and Hart; some of the subtleties of the relationships among the cops in the squad room, the citizens of south Louisiana, and the criminals; the policeman/investigator/gumshoe triangle; the different kinds of gumshoes that Cohle and Hart each represent; and the ultimate nature of Hart and Cohle as Janus figures.

Not bad for a few notes.



Hart is the police procedural guy. If you need someone to do footwork, to interview witnesses (which is different from interrogating suspects, please note), to track down documents, to check IRS filings, then he's your guy. He's patient, methodical, focused, clear, and insightful. He's resourceful and clever. The best example of this is when he tells Cohle how he tracked down the company that did the landscaping on various government properties and how it was linked to another company that the Childress family ran. (As an aside, keep in mind that these kinds of municipal/state contracts are wildly nepotistic in the South, and the deeper you go, the worse they get.) 

Hart is a gumshoe without the freedoms of true independence; whereas the gumshoe traditionally does not have a wife, children, or other family ties, Hart's children and to some extent his ex-wife keep him bound to the area. Otherwise, Hart has the classic gumshoe characteristics: he's rough and unrefined; he knows how to work someone over; he's good with details; and he only fits in as a cop when he's with other cops and citizens in the daylight. Once nighttime falls, he becomes someone different. 



In contrast, Cohle is an investigator. He's a gumshoe without any need to be a gumshoe. He's rejected, an outsider, dismissed by his colleagues. He's smarter than other cops, more experienced, and because of that, he doesn't fit in well. He can fit in as a police investigator during the day, but as with Hart, he's in his true element in the nighttime scenes. More so than other investigators, Cohle "knows some moves," as Hart puts it, and above all else, he is a supreme "box man" or interrogator. As within the gumshoe tradition, Cohle must contaminate himself with drugs and alcohol (the alcohol disguised as cough syrup) to access the borderlands of criminality. He uses the prostitutes at the truck stop to get drugs so that he can sleep, as well as using them to get information about Dora Lange. 

Both Hart and Cohle are Janus figures, dual faced and duplicitous. Hart's infidelities make him overtly duplicitous, but in ways that do not matter to the police force. His duplicities are of no consequence to his colleagues. On the other hand, Cohle seems as if he is concealing everything about himself, yet he conceals very little. He is in no way duplicitous, yet others believe that he is, because to believe him and to believe in him would mean no longer denying that he is superior outside of being a box man. Cohle is ultimately the figure that shows up the lie of equality-as-identicality.

So who is the true detective?

It's too easy to say there's no true detective. Cohle and Hart are compromised as police officers, as investigators, and as persons. But is it possible to be a true detective, and if so, what does it mean to be one? Is there a code by which a true detective may live? What would that code be? The operative word is "true." Is it possible to be true, and if so, what does that mean?

Idea map 9: Palimpsests.

Brief notes today; no Internet access except through my cell phone's portable hot spot, which is fine, but not quite the same thing.

I've talked a lot about palimpsests in various contexts with regard to True Detective. The key one is the palimpsest of the crime scene and the current day, which I discussed in a previous idea map. There are other palimpsests about, however, so I'll briefly address them, then come back to this idea map and flesh them out more.

One of the legacies of the cult's activities is the way their actions destroy the survivors' lives. Kelly, the girl rescued from the LeDoux encampment, survives with severe psychological trauma and catatonia, such that Cohle is the first person she's spoken to since shortly after her rescue (the time is indefinite). Toby, who had been a student at one of the Tuttle schools, is now a male prostitute in the French Quarter. The past sexual abuse is the text and history beneath Kelly and Toby's current circumstances.

Similarly, the quasi-normal day-to-day lives of the inhabitants of south Louisiana are laid over the cult's activities. The political power of the cult members ensures that the murders and abuse do not surface. The normal is a thin veil over the occult.

It's tough to call which one is the writing and which one is the palimpsest, Carcosa or south Louisiana. Both are surreal places. Both have unbelievable events occurring. Both are led by the powerful and the corrupt. 

Cohle and Hart's private investigation overlays the police investigations--the multiple investigations, that is--and both of those overlay the crime scene.

This is the last of my idea maps. Next, more thoughts from other sources.

Idea map 8: True Detective, Lovecraft.

 

Aye, this one'll be complicated, Captain.

Lovecraft is the link between True Detective and Chambers's The King in Yellow. Lovecraft is the link between the figure of the police investigator and that of the artist-investigator. The first, uncertain tropes of weird fiction that precede Lovecraft's work reach new maturity in his stories. From there, the questions that both detective fiction and weird fiction raise are explored, without being answered, and passed on to successive generations of writers.

The inner ring:

The unreliable narrator. Good lord, where would Lovecraft be without the unreliable narrator? It's the centerpiece of his fiction. The details vary among stories, but Lovecraft's main character is often an investigator who (1) opens his story that he knows few if any will believe, and does so (2) when he is already on the edge of sanity as a result of the events he has witnessed, possibly in which he has participated, and whose story is thus (3) part scientific log, part investigative report, part confession. 

The narrative palimpsest. In Lovecraft, the relatively simple notion of a palimpsest--a document that has had its original writings mostly or completely removed and another set of writings overlaid--becomes more complicated. There are multiple movers in multiple domains in Lovecraft, ranging from the unpredictable, lunatic ravings of gods and godlike figures, to the similarly lunatic worship conducted by their cultists, to the occasional victims of the cults who witness terrible events, to the investigators who for whatever reason catch wind of the cult activity and follow up, to the authorities who may or may not accept the investigators' reports as accurate. For instance, it is not unusual for a main character to be writing from within the walls of an insane asylum, where he has been placed by the authorities because his story is too difficult to believe.

Because Lovecraft's narrators are trustworthy to the reader--this is a result of Lovecraft's careful, precise attention to realism and current scientific theory and evidence--the narrative they offer is believable as well. This corresponds in True Detective to Cohle's notebooks and extensive documentation of the cult's activities, culminating in the damning videotape of Marie Fontenot's rape and murder, shown to Hart in episode 7, "After You're Gone." The modern-day correspondence to realism and scientific evidence is video, and that level of evidence is what Hart requires to understand fully the extent of the cult's activities. The simultaneity of eldritch horror and human reality is Lovecraft's specialty, and its translation in True Detective follows both detective fiction and weird fiction conventions.

In True Detective, just as in Lovecraft's fiction, the characters' actions are driven by an occult text. Once Cohle discovers Dora Lange's diary with its passages on the Yellow King, those elements of the narrative become codified. Because they are in text, they are quantifiable and believable. (Had Dora Lange or another cultist/victim showed up chanting "Cassilda's Song" from The King in Yellow, that character would have been written off as more than unreliable--s/he would have been unbelievable.) Lange's diary assumes its place among the other investigative documents, not the least of which is the series of police reports marked "filed in error" as part of the cover-up. Part of the reason why the written diary assumes its importance is that it can be referred to multiple times without risk of narrative change or error. If a person were relating Lange's experience, that recollection might change under different circumstances. A printed text cannot do that--unless, of course, it is a palimpsest.

Fortunately, the epistolary narrative is not the only one available to us and to the detectives. There's also a poetic narrative that surfaces during interrogations, especially the too-brief interrogation of Reggie LeDoux:

I know what happens next. I saw you in my dream. You're in Carcosa now with me. He sees you. You'll do this again. Time is a flat circle. The sun sinks into a twin black star. (episode 5, "The Secret Fate of All Life")

Cohle's explication of LeDoux's statement is equally poetic:

In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow, nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill. And you are reborn, but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Who knows? I mean, you can't remember your lives. You can't change your lives. And that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped. Like a nightmare you keep waking up into. (episode 5, "The Secret Fate of All Life")

But there is a false narrative, originating from Gilbough and Patania, that wars against the actual narrative, witnessed by Cohle during the flashback when he investigates the school. The police officers are following the false narrative because they've established the reality as they understand it. Cohle doesn't assume anything and is thus open to new narrative.

The entire investigation past Dora Lange's murder is spurred by philosophy, not police procedural tactics. Once Cohle hears Guy Francis's claim that the murderer is still free, Cohle's philosophical position as an artist-investigator will not permit him to let the claim go uninvestigated. As an artist, his guiding point is to explicate the truth, just as it is for himself as an investigator. It is philosophically impossible for Cohle to avoid continuing the investigation into the cult and its activities.  

The cult activity itself leads the investigators to follow the path of the cultists, including the tangential paths of their sacrifices. In the world of True Detective, everything is sacrificial. Hart sacrifices his family for the sake of his adulterous relationships. Cohle sacrifices himself for the sake of his clarity as an artistic, semi-monastic investigator. Gilbough and Patania, on the other hand, sacrifice nothing, instead seeking to gain as the result of their investigation. That is precisely why they cannot and will not be able to find the true murderer--they cannot be the true detectives.

The problem is that, for the true detective, discovering the truth means teetering on the edge of sanity. Lovecraft's investigators, regardless of what occupation they might have had before entering the narrative, rarely escape confinement, peril, or death. The truth is simply too difficult to face. Similarly in True Detective, the truth about the extent of the cult's activities is limited to what can be safely exposed after Errol Childress's death. Nothing about his family connections can be revealed without dire consequence to the very social and political structures of south Louisiana. 

The fact that there are circumstances that are not believable unless the narrator is an initiate or an investigator is yet another link between True Detective and Lovecraft. The very fabric of Lovecraft's narratives are circumstances that exist outside--and sometimes well outside--the normal experiences of the general populace. It's that general populace who must be spared from the knowledge that murders and worse occur because of fanaticism. It's the concealed madmen within the general cloak of normalcy that is the final betrayal.