UBC: Vickers, The Department of Dead Ends; White, The Aliens Among Us

[truepenny]

Vickers, Roy. The Department of Dead Ends. New York: Dover Publications, 1978.

Let me get the thank-god-I-live-in-the-future moment over with before I try to talk about these stories properly.

From "The Man Who Murdered in Public" (first published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, 1944):

Of his three wives Madge, who was the second, was the only really bad one. She was slovenly and quarrelsome. Her ill-nature, indeed, came near to imperiling George's plan. [N.b., this would be the plan to murder her for the insurance money.] For she soon became known as a termagant--the kind of woman that nearly every kind of man would very soon come to hate. They lived in the upper part of a jerry-built house in Harringay, and all the neighbours knew that occasionally they came to blows, after which she would be docile and well-behaved for nearly a week.

It is probable that her detestable temperament made George speed up the programme. They had a scrap on the Thursday before Whitsun 1906. George lost his temper this time and very nearly had to call a doctor for her afterwards. After the thumping she was extra docile, and perhaps George saw his last chance of staging a reconciliation. He took her to Paignton, a growing seaside resort on the south coast of Devon.

I imagine my reaction to this need not be explicated. I just wanted to note it as an Alien life form, back away slowly experience, because those are always simultaneously interesting and really really disconcerting. And I'm glad "thumping" one's wife to make her "docile" is no longer considered perfectly understandable. (Like most of Vickers' characters, George is a reasonable man--except for his habit of cold-bloodedly murdering his wives.)

The Department of Dead Ends is like the Dead Letter Office: where unsolved cases go to die. The fourteen stories in this collection are all about murderers who got away with it for months, or even years, until something caused Scotland Yard to cross-connect in a way that revealed the truth.

These stories fit, with eerie perfection, Hannah Arendt's phrase about the banality of evil. Vickers' murderer/protagonists are all ordinary people. Those who commit premeditated murder generally murder for money; for those who are driven to crimes of passion, the passion is generally a desperate desire to escape their victim. This is especially well done in "A Fool and Her Money," where the reader as much as Surbrook feels like a fly floundering in the web of an exasperatingly stupid spider. The thing the murderers have in common is their (sociopathic) ability to cease to view the victim as a human being. Some, like George in "The Man Who Murdered for Money" are clearly sociopathic from the get-go; others, like Margaret in "The Nine-Pound Murder," generate a kind of sociopathic bubble around their specific victim. Murder requires egotism: this is Vickers' fundamental theme.

And, on the flip side, the stories themselves absolutely wallow in their banality. They're very rarely told as mysteries; the reader knows exactly who the murderer is and what they're doing and why. And the process of solving the cases is luck and a species of persistence that Vickers doesn't even admire. The recurring character, Detective Inspector Rason, is simply too stupid to know when he's beat. Most of the cases are solved by accident. Vickers is deliberately leaching the tension and romance out of the murder mystery--one often doesn't even feel sympathy with the victim--reducing it to a sort of existentialist meditation on the randomness and futility of most human pursuits.

---

White, James. The Aliens Among Us. Ballantine Books, 1969.

This collection has one Sector General story in it, plus at least a couple of others that belong in the same universe ("Tableau" and "Occupation: Warrior"). The Sector General story is not one of the better ones (White has to work far too hard to get Conway into his unsolvable dilemma, and my disbelief did not stay suspended), and it, too, offered an Alien life form, back away slowly moment:

"Basically your trouble is that you want to whistle after crabs," Mannen said as they found a table. Before Conway could reply he added quickly, "Female crabs, of course. I did not mean to imply that there was anything seriously wrong with you."

Here at Sector General, we don't worry until your unwanted xenophilia actually makes you, you know, a pervert.

[/sarcasm]

As with my earlier post about "Misogyny is an allowable neurosis" I'm not screaming for White's blood. I'm just saying ... well, basically, I'm saying that no matter how rotten things sometimes seem, we have come a tremendously long way in the past forty years. And I'm grateful for it.

I think White also offers a lovely case-study of the limitations of utopianism. You can only go as far as the limits of your own mind--which is why utopias are so close to dystopias and why historical utopian communities either have failed spectacularly or look, to outsiders, uncomfortably like cults. A utopia is one person's vision of a perfect society; it's definitionally radical. And so either other people buy in (cult), or they don't (spectacular failure). But this is also the inherent flaw in all utopias: one person's vision.

It's a truism among graduate students that the moment you commit to your thesis, someone will publish a book on your subject. Ideally, someone really famous. (This did, in fact, happen to me. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet and Purgatory.) This phenomenon causes panic and hand-wringing and raging in the streets, but it really shouldn't. Because no two people will ever look at one topic in the same way. Professor Greenblatt and I can look at exactly the same source material--the ghost in Hamlet--and even agree about what cultural concerns are being played out, and we will still come to substantively different conclusions. His work does not diminish mine, because I'm not him. There are more than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.

But this truth means that all utopias contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Because the more radical your vision, the more idiosyncratic it is and the less it has to do with what makes real societies work: compromise. Obviously, a fictional utopia can finesse this problem, but there still comes that moment where the reader has to decide whether she buys in.

And in a lot of ways, I do buy into White's utopia. I like his ideals; I want the universe to look more like what he says it does than I believe is the case. But then there are the things that turn his utopia into my dystopia, and it's back to the drawing board for both of us.

Comments

[beautifuldorian.livejournal.com]

I think a utopian society can only be achieved in death. Because as you said, no two people will ever think of it the same way. I'm fond o saying 'All of reality is completely subjective" and it's true. This is a computer I'm typing on, but it would be another thing to someone speaking a different language, a god to a neanderthal, the devil to a Puritan...

So, then, once you realize the idea that a., each human wants their own perfect society and that b., perfection and time are mutually exclusive, and c., humans are trapped by time, then it's pretty obvious that humans can never have -anything- perfect. Perfection implies a thing does not change, and the only constant in this world is change. Therefore, a utopian society is a self-defeating concept. Then again I kind of think =everything= is made with the seeds of its destruction within it. Look at us humans. We age because our RNA slowly deteriorates after billion of copies, and no matter what medicine we invent or machines we make up we'll never be able to undo that, because we're born screwed. Nothing gold can stay, and all.