The eclectic nature of Atwood's youthful reading has been well documented, both in her own interviews and by her biographers (for example, Cooke 24–5). Her literary tastes included not only classics such as Gulliver's Travels and Moby Dick, but potboilers, popular paperbacks and comics. Apart from an affectionate and satirical nod to her early enjoyment of horror, science fiction and crime writing, the author has serious motives in returning to, and appropriating, such genres.
In a 1977 interview, Atwood explains that she sees popular art as material for serious art.
Underpinning that assertion is her belief that genre fiction expresses the unconscious dreams of society: 'Some of them sell hope; others sell disaster, which seems to be equally appealing.
You can ask all sorts of questions about why people wish to hear these particular stories, but popular art itself does not ask these questions.
It merely repeats the stories'#6491•
Atwood's appropriation of generic forms is therefore a means to project and interrogate art forms which are unquestioning expressions of the social imaginary, the purpose being to open them up to scrutiny. In an earlier interview, the author talks of getting such mythologies 'out into the place where they can be viewed.
And I don't believe that people should divest themselves of all these mythologies because I think, in a way, everyone needs one.
It's just a question of getting one that is livable and not destructive to you' ('Preserving Mythologies' 32).
There is, then, more than affectionate parody at work here.
Besides subverting readerly expectations, there is a didactic purpose to Atwood's strategies, one involving the manipulation of generic forms in order to open them up to new ideas:
Every one of those art forms has a certain set of brackets round it … Some of the most interesting things happen when you expand the brackets … It's the same with any form. You have to understand what the form is doing, how it works, before you say, "Now we're going to make it different, we're going to do this thing which is unusual, we're going to turn it upside down, we're going to move it so it includes something which isn't supposed to be there, we're going to surprise the reader." ('Tightrope Walking' 193)#6487•
Clearly, Atwood's approach to generic revision is both subversive and expansive in nature. Ljundberg captures these twin impulses when she comments: 'By questioning the restrictive limitations of their prospective genres, Atwood uses them as strategies … transgresses them and opens them up to their creative potential' (29).
Atwood has spoken of her relationship to tradition in much the same manner: 'If you're a writer you need not discard the tradition, nor do you have to succumb to it … [A tradition] can be used as material for new departures' (Survival 282).
This book is about exactly that: how, and why, Atwood expands and departs from the crime fiction tradition.#6483•
Poe called his detective stories 'tales of ratiocination', and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' begins with an explanation of how even the subterranean workings of another's mind are accessible through careful observation and analysis. To celebrate Dupin's mental powers, Poe makes his sleuth a recluse, a man who lives behind drawn curtains and ventures out chiefly at night.
Social connectedness and external stimulation appear unnecessary to his success.
In fact, in the second of these tales, 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt', Dupin does not leave his room at all; he solves the case of a young woman whose murdered corpse has been found in the Seine simply by analyzing a series of newspaper reports spread before him.#6475•
Cuder has commented, 'At the bottom of each Atwoodian plot lies a mystery, often in the shape of a corpse' (16). Her observation supports the central premise of this book: that Atwood is engaged in writing her own species of crime fiction. It is not difficult to see the basis for Cuder's contention.#6471•
In privileging an individually motivated and perpetrated killing, classic crime fiction suggests transgression springs primarily from personal impulses, locating the cause of harmful behaviour in the inadequately socialized individual. Caillois puts the matter thus: 'In detective literature the murder is always the consequence of scheming in the service of an instinct' (5).
Humm also notes that in traditional detective fiction crime is an eruption of deviance, while the detective acts as a witchdoctor-figure, pinning blame on scapegoated troublemakers (206).
Atwood's novels suggest otherwise; crime is never presented purely as the result of impulse or instinct – catalysts which naturalize such behaviour – but is shown to be bound up with interpellating social structures and systems.
Fundamental to Atwood's exploration of wrongdoing is the issue of power, which she sums up as 'who gets to do what to whom' ('Using What You're Given' 149).
Since the worlds of her fiction reflect the fact that patriarchy confers more power on men than on women, male characters are among the most, though by no means only, damaging figures in the novels discussed here which focus sharply, but by no means exclusively, on the consequences for women.
As will be shown, however, female characters frequently collude in patriarchal crimes.#6505•
Atwood's fiction also employs a patterning of events and situations to suggest crime stems not from inherently warped individuals but from warping social structures, so that malfeasance appears to arise from the occupation, rather than the occupier, of power roles.#6472•
In locating guilt within rogue individuals, gangs or secret organizations, then purging society of these undesirable elements, crime fiction has been charged with reaffirming the social order and, in effect, refounding society. Consequently, it has been identified as a largely conservative genre, one that masks the evils inherent in social systems themselves.#6506•
For example, Priestman argues, 'in being hoodwinked by the detective cult, the public are overlooking the real source of social solutions' (Crime Fiction 18). Such a critique does not apply to Atwood's work; in the process of uncovering and exorcising particular traumatic and transgressive acts, wider, socially embedded crimes are revealed.
In this respect, the author's approach to crime is in stark opposition to English detective fiction of the Golden Age, which has been criticized for its determination to analyze and resolve transgression on a one-off basis rather than expose and explore the root causes of crime.
Knight, for example, states that the Golden Age detective story 'largely ignores social messages to concentrate on the deep-seated deceptions and … betrayals in the life of extended but also isolated families' (Crime Fiction 1800–2000 82).
Bodily Harm especially parodies this branch of the genre through the mise en abyme of the game of Clue.
The comforting parameters of its clearly identifiable playing pieces and tightly enclosed domestic space are confounded by the duplicitous identities and complex political machinations confronting Rennie Wilford.
In short, Atwood's novels problematize the notions that agency and identity are easily formulated and that crime is a single, locatable event rather than an embedded aspect of culture, or of wider, cross-cultural forces.#6488•
Evil in Chandler's work therefore appears less a condition and product of a particular ideology and the roles it prescribes than a corruption within the occupants of those roles. As a result, as Cranny-Francis observes, social fragmentation becomes embodied in certain individuals, and the myth of social order is preserved (152).
In contrast, Atwood's novels begin in the manner of the whodunit – with a disappearance, death or break-in – so that mystery, drama and human interest are evoked through a narrative of specific events and characters.
Yet, in unravelling those particular events, broader evils, embedded in social structures and practices, are revealed.
If, as Cranny-Francis says, traditionally the detective resolves the contradictions created by the crime and restores the world to order (146), Atwood does the opposite, revealing as inherent in the social order practices which are both sanctioned yet indefensible.
This is in sharp contrast to the fiction the author consumed as a teenager.
Sherlock Holmes's preference for crimes which are 'singular and whimsical' ('The Blue Carbuncle' (1892) 186), tending towards the 'unusual and even the fantastic' ('The Speckled Band' (1892) 187) are evidence of Doyle's lack of focus on endemic, ubiquitous wrongs#6492•
The means by which Atwood's protagonists arrive at a clearer understanding is in marked contrast to the methods attributed to the sleuth she fell in love with as a young girl. Unsurprisingly, given Doyle's emphasis on Holmes's rational powers, a word most frequently associated with his method of detection is logic,9 deduction being the mental process ubiquitously alluded to.
Far fewer references are made to Holmes's use of inference, though this is the foundation of his craft, as it is of all detective work.
His actual method is abduction, a term coined by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who often refers to the concept as 'presumption' or 'hypothetical inference'.
Peirce describes deduction as a purely logical mental process that moves from Rule to Case to inevitable Result:
Rule:
All the beans in this beanbag are white
Case:
These beans are from this beanbag
Result:
These beans are white.#6489•
In contrast, abduction is not so much involved with the logical consequences of a given premise as with the interpretation of perceived phenomena. It moves from Result to Rule to Case:
Result:
These beans are white
Rule:
All the beans in this beanbag are white
Case:
These beans are from this beanbag.#6469•
Despite his repeated references to Holmes's powers of deduction, Doyle is quite conscious of his sleuth's abductive methodology. Holmes calls it 'backwards reasoning', and describes it to Watson thus:
"In solving a problem … the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. … Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will be able to tell you what the result would be. … There are few people, however, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result.
This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically." (A Study in Scarlet 141)#6504•
Crake's interpellation is clear in the way his language echoes that of corrupt forces; he refers to HelthWyzer's delivery of viruses encysted in vitamin pills as an 'elegant delivery system' (248) and to his own work on the deathly BlyssPluss pill as an 'elegant concept' (348). Clearly, Atwood's novels perform in direct opposition to Doyle's stories, which, as Priestman puts it, 'celebrate the capacity of rationalism to organise the material of existence meaningfully, and the power of the mind to protect it from semiotic and moral chaos' ('The Short Story from Poe to Chesterton' 48).
Instead, in Atwood's works moral chaos is exactly what arises from over-reliance on rationalism.#6495•
As the attribution of meaning to signs, abduction is an activity involved in all our efforts to read reality, and highly pertinent to the attempts of Atwood's protagonists to make sense of their experiences. Yet Eco's account of abduction in 'Horns, Hooves, Insteps' suggests the difficulties Atwood's characters will encounter.
Eco bases his discussion on an instance from Doyle's 'The Blue Carbuncle'.
Here, Holmes is handed a black felt hat covered with dust.
He notes this is not the gritty kind from the street, but fluffy dust accumulated indoors.
From this Holmes concludes that the possessor's wife no longer loves her husband (169).
He assigns meaning to the dust by abducing it to a rule: wives who neglect their husbands' appearances no longer love them.
Eco describes Holmes's procedure as browsing a 'global semantic encyclopaedia', a repository of all sets, scripts, frames, stereotypes and common knowledge.#6493•
Doyle confers upon Holmes wide-ranging knowledge, suggesting he can elude the browsing constraints that beset his fellow men and avoid the pitfalls of 'local' thinking. For example, in 'The Adventure of the Three Garridebs' (1924), Watson notices the word plow in a newspaper advertisement and immediately assumes a misspelling, while Holmes concludes the originator is American (134–5).
In A Study in Scarlet, the police assume the letters Rache written in blood at the crime scene are an incomplete inscription of 'Rachel', while Holmes immediately recognizes the German word for revenge (45).
In fact, Holmes's refusal to pin blame upon the obvious culprit to whom all evidence seems to point, and in pursuit of whom Scotland Yard are distracted from the real perpetrator, is Doyle's means of asserting that Holmes is never misled by conventional thinking.#6484•
Holmes's categorical generalizations vary from the starkly patriarchal –
Women are never to be entirely trusted – not even the best of them. (A Study in Scarlet 82)
Women are naturally secretive and they like to do their own secreting. (A Scandal in Bohemia 33)
– to the fairly bizarre.#6479•
It is no wonder, therefore, Atwood's characters struggle for understanding. To be successful detectives, they must dismantle their current mindsets in order to construct new ways of looking. Atwood's detective-figures need to be, in Alewyn's words, 'immune to the deception of the probable, and prepared for the reality of the unusual' (77).
Bonfantini and Proni argue that the abductive processes of most fictional detectives necessarily lack originality in order not to alienate the reader, since 'the guilt of an individual must be proved on the basis of well-tried interpretations, according to commonly accepted codes and certain facts' (128).
In contrast, Alewyn points out that detective fiction depicts such a remarkably slippery reality that ordinary detectives frequently find themselves obliged to turn to eccentric outsiders for help.
Therefore, Alewyn argues, far from being a conventional thinker, the successful detective is a kind of artist, able to imagine and construct alternative worlds.
Such artistry is starkly opposed to the rationality for which Doyle's sleuth is valorized.#6503•
In contrast, Atwood presents hegemonic forces as an inescapable influence on vision. Bodily Harm begins with an epigraph quoting Ways of Seeing, one asserting that sight is far from impartial: 'A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast a woman's presence … defines what can and cannot be done to her.' The experiences of Atwood's characters show how eyes conspire with the mindset of the onlooker.#6480•
Resignification perfectly illustrates Holmes's assertion that accurate interpretation depends upon the observer's mental framework. As he comments to Watson, 'When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth'#6497•