DLS: HHC 6: storytelling again
May. 15th, 2003 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyPrevious DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, Have His Carcase 2, Have His Carcase 3, Have His Carcase 4, Have His Carcase 5.
I hope y'all are reading the comments, too, because there are incredibly smart people saying incredibly smart things. Also convincing me that I need to do canon-spanning posts on music, and also the media. (Not together.) But first I'm going to get through these HHC posts, or I shall forget entirely what I'm doing.
So, I'd gotten up through Chapter 15 in my stately progression. I'm going to try to bounce through to Chapter 27 in this post, so that I can catch up to where I am in the book, because I got behind last week when I couldn't freaking type. But we'll see how that works out (she says dubiously).
Spoilers. Including the identity of the murderer.
Also, I've got no idea if there will be a coherent theme to this essaylet or not. I'm going to start typing and see what happens.
"The Evidence of the Sands" (Ch. 16) gives us both a ironic deconstruction of Peter and Harriet's romance ("To walk along a solitary shore with one's heart's idol in the calm of a summer's afternoon may be classed as an agreeable occupation; but it loses much of its charm when ..." (HHC 206)) and a metatextually performative lapse from narrative into drama: "the conversation, such as it was, rather resembled the dialogue of a Russian tragedy" (HHC 207). This is one of my favorite set-pieces in HHC, but aside from its metatexuality, its performative nature, and the generally entertaining spectacle of Peter and Harriet matching and mangling quotes, it also, again, highlights their generic inheritance:
They've just agreed the boot isn't a useful clue, and yet they hang onto it because it's the sort of thing a detective in this tradition ought to do.
The episode of the horseshoe (which always reminds me in reverse of the beginning of The Name of the Rose) highlights a critical difference between Harriet Vane and Charles Parker. The conversation between Peter, the blacksmith, and the yokel is highly reminiscent of Peter's conversation with Ben Cobling in Unnatural Death. But Harriet, unlike Charles, keeps her mouth shut and lets Peter work. One could make all sorts of unpleasant readings of this--the silencing of women, Harriet's submission to Peter, yada yada--but I think it's much simpler than that. Harriet knows she has nothing to contribute, and she isn't blinded by her own official importance into thinking she should control the conversation anyway. Harriet, like Peter, is more intuitive than methodical, and thus more able to adapt to a situation without trying to make it conform to her mental structures and rules. Harriet is a better partner for Peter than Charles: less complementary, but more understanding.
As a side note toward that music post I'm going to do: in HHC, rather than playing the piano, Peter composes doggerels to be sung to the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush." Music is debased currency in Wilvercombe.
I've already talked about the vamping of Henry Weldon, both in reference to its metatextuality and its sexual politics, and since it's a section I'm remarkably unfond of, I intend to leave it at that and move on to the inquest, merely remarking in passing that Peter, Umpelty, and Glaisher are constructing stories hand over fist, struggling to find some plausible narrative for the set of facts they are burdened with.
At the inquest, Harriet gives her evidence well because "her training as a mystery writer [had] taught her to assemble details of this kind coherently" (HHC 272). Both Mrs. Weldon and Leila Garland are very self-consciously performing their parts (the Betrothed, the Ladylove). The coroner's opinion is based largely on his reading of Russian literature, which is partly a jab at the insular prejudices of Englishmen, but partly also another variation on the book's theme of the intersection between life and fiction. And Wimsey grinning at Umpelty "over this convenient summary, with its useful suppressions and assumptions" (HHC 281) recalls Peter and Sally Hardy likewise constructing a story of suppressions and assumptions to lure in Bright. Henry's sexist grumblings about clichés point at novelistic conventions: "Women always get that idea of blood running about all over the place. Always reading novels. 'Wallowing in gore.' That kind of stuff" (HHC 285). The conversation also prompts Peter to his highest flight of fancy yet.
"The Evidence of the Mannequin" begins by foregrounding novels and novel-writing. Harriet's novel having gone sticky, she has turned to reading Paul Alexis's collection of fiction, which as I mentioned in the post on Peter and Paul, shows us a good deal about Paul Alexis's ideas of what heroism is, and how stories work if you happen to be the hero of them. Then the interlude of Olga Kohn and Isaac Sullivan, about which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ajhalluk has already said the stuff that I would have been saying here. Except that clearly Morecambe is even more like Richard III than Sullivan, Horrocks, or Wimsey realize: "'I always think,' said Wimsey, 'that Shakespeare meant Richard to be one of those men who are always deliberately acting a part'" (HHC 309). That's Morecambe right down to the ground. Sullivan may also be my favorite bit-part in the canon, and it's interesting that his jeremiad against type-casting highlights the fact that, in HHC the murderers are both type-cast: Henry is brutish and violent and stupid, as his half of the murder-plot requires him to be; Morecambe is scheming and play-acting and in general, hey, Richard III. The murderers here are not the Least Likely Suspect (and is it in HHC or BH that Peter points out that by the rules of the genre, as formulated by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Least Likely Suspect is always guilty?). They are both suspicious from the get-go and stay that way. I don't know what to make of this, but there it is.
The funeral again is an excuse for Leila and Mrs. Weldon to perform their self-appointed roles. (And can someone please tell me: what are Parma violets and how do they differ from other kinds of violets?) Mr. Julian Perkins continues to enact the Red Herring. "The Evidence of the Dictionary" gives us yet more efforts at plausible story-telling, this time from P. C. Ormond, who I freely admit bores me. And then we come to the meta again, with the discussion of how one constructs a plausible story
Now, I knowajhalluk is going to protest that Sayers is doing exactly what she animadverts against here. Since I personally have very little ability to judge the credibility or otherwise of a plot like this (I mean, come on, I read John Dickson Carr by the bale. My tolerance for artificially contrived plots is right off the meter.), I'm not going to address the question of whether HHC's plot falls victim to the same problems it castigates its characters for. I'm simply going to note here, as I have noted elsewhere, that the process of constructing a detective novel is emphasized throughout HHC, as the detectives imagine scenario after scenario which might be the deep structure of the novel.
In this same conversation/confrontation, Harriet again raises the specter of her own possible duality of role, as she did with Peter in "Evidence of Trouble Somewhere," envisioning an alternate version of HHC in which she is Murderer rather than Detective:
Harriet proceeds viciously to outline the pieces of evidence against herself which, were she the murderer, the detective would either uncover or observe. But Glaisher gives the unanswerable response, in a Golden Age detective story: the obvious suspect (as Peter observes to Ferguson in The Five Red Herrings) is never the culprit. Like T5RH, in fact, HHC spins off any number of alternative versions of itself in its course through its own narrative.
I wish also to point out that the code used by the conspirators is one Wimsey had recently come across in a detective story (HHC 341).
And that brings us up through Ch. 27, which is where I said I wanted to get to. Go me. As predicted, not much argumentative structure here, but that's because mostly I'm following patterns I've already established in previous posts--which will likely continue to be the state of affairs until I've finished with HHC. Like Lord Peter, I believe in clearing trumps.
Next up, Have His Carcase 7.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
I hope y'all are reading the comments, too, because there are incredibly smart people saying incredibly smart things. Also convincing me that I need to do canon-spanning posts on music, and also the media. (Not together.) But first I'm going to get through these HHC posts, or I shall forget entirely what I'm doing.
So, I'd gotten up through Chapter 15 in my stately progression. I'm going to try to bounce through to Chapter 27 in this post, so that I can catch up to where I am in the book, because I got behind last week when I couldn't freaking type. But we'll see how that works out (she says dubiously).
Spoilers. Including the identity of the murderer.
Also, I've got no idea if there will be a coherent theme to this essaylet or not. I'm going to start typing and see what happens.
"The Evidence of the Sands" (Ch. 16) gives us both a ironic deconstruction of Peter and Harriet's romance ("To walk along a solitary shore with one's heart's idol in the calm of a summer's afternoon may be classed as an agreeable occupation; but it loses much of its charm when ..." (HHC 206)) and a metatextually performative lapse from narrative into drama: "the conversation, such as it was, rather resembled the dialogue of a Russian tragedy" (HHC 207). This is one of my favorite set-pieces in HHC, but aside from its metatexuality, its performative nature, and the generally entertaining spectacle of Peter and Harriet matching and mangling quotes, it also, again, highlights their generic inheritance:
Harriet: It's an awfully heavy boot.
Peter: I can't help that; it's a boot. Dr. Thorndyke likes boots.
(HHC 207)
They've just agreed the boot isn't a useful clue, and yet they hang onto it because it's the sort of thing a detective in this tradition ought to do.
The episode of the horseshoe (which always reminds me in reverse of the beginning of The Name of the Rose) highlights a critical difference between Harriet Vane and Charles Parker. The conversation between Peter, the blacksmith, and the yokel is highly reminiscent of Peter's conversation with Ben Cobling in Unnatural Death. But Harriet, unlike Charles, keeps her mouth shut and lets Peter work. One could make all sorts of unpleasant readings of this--the silencing of women, Harriet's submission to Peter, yada yada--but I think it's much simpler than that. Harriet knows she has nothing to contribute, and she isn't blinded by her own official importance into thinking she should control the conversation anyway. Harriet, like Peter, is more intuitive than methodical, and thus more able to adapt to a situation without trying to make it conform to her mental structures and rules. Harriet is a better partner for Peter than Charles: less complementary, but more understanding.
As a side note toward that music post I'm going to do: in HHC, rather than playing the piano, Peter composes doggerels to be sung to the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush." Music is debased currency in Wilvercombe.
I've already talked about the vamping of Henry Weldon, both in reference to its metatextuality and its sexual politics, and since it's a section I'm remarkably unfond of, I intend to leave it at that and move on to the inquest, merely remarking in passing that Peter, Umpelty, and Glaisher are constructing stories hand over fist, struggling to find some plausible narrative for the set of facts they are burdened with.
At the inquest, Harriet gives her evidence well because "her training as a mystery writer [had] taught her to assemble details of this kind coherently" (HHC 272). Both Mrs. Weldon and Leila Garland are very self-consciously performing their parts (the Betrothed, the Ladylove). The coroner's opinion is based largely on his reading of Russian literature, which is partly a jab at the insular prejudices of Englishmen, but partly also another variation on the book's theme of the intersection between life and fiction. And Wimsey grinning at Umpelty "over this convenient summary, with its useful suppressions and assumptions" (HHC 281) recalls Peter and Sally Hardy likewise constructing a story of suppressions and assumptions to lure in Bright. Henry's sexist grumblings about clichés point at novelistic conventions: "Women always get that idea of blood running about all over the place. Always reading novels. 'Wallowing in gore.' That kind of stuff" (HHC 285). The conversation also prompts Peter to his highest flight of fancy yet.
"The Evidence of the Mannequin" begins by foregrounding novels and novel-writing. Harriet's novel having gone sticky, she has turned to reading Paul Alexis's collection of fiction, which as I mentioned in the post on Peter and Paul, shows us a good deal about Paul Alexis's ideas of what heroism is, and how stories work if you happen to be the hero of them. Then the interlude of Olga Kohn and Isaac Sullivan, about which
ajhalluk has already said the stuff that I would have been saying here. Except that clearly Morecambe is even more like Richard III than Sullivan, Horrocks, or Wimsey realize: "'I always think,' said Wimsey, 'that Shakespeare meant Richard to be one of those men who are always deliberately acting a part'" (HHC 309). That's Morecambe right down to the ground. Sullivan may also be my favorite bit-part in the canon, and it's interesting that his jeremiad against type-casting highlights the fact that, in HHC the murderers are both type-cast: Henry is brutish and violent and stupid, as his half of the murder-plot requires him to be; Morecambe is scheming and play-acting and in general, hey, Richard III. The murderers here are not the Least Likely Suspect (and is it in HHC or BH that Peter points out that by the rules of the genre, as formulated by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Least Likely Suspect is always guilty?). They are both suspicious from the get-go and stay that way. I don't know what to make of this, but there it is.The funeral again is an excuse for Leila and Mrs. Weldon to perform their self-appointed roles. (And can someone please tell me: what are Parma violets and how do they differ from other kinds of violets?) Mr. Julian Perkins continues to enact the Red Herring. "The Evidence of the Dictionary" gives us yet more efforts at plausible story-telling, this time from P. C. Ormond, who I freely admit bores me. And then we come to the meta again, with the discussion of how one constructs a plausible story
Harriet said nothing.
"And what do you think?" Wimsey asked her, suddenly.
"I don't believe a word of it," said Harriet.
Glaisher laughed.
"Miss Vane's intuition, as they call it, is against it," said he.
"It's not intuition," retorted Harriet. "There's no such thing. It's common sense. It's artistic sense, if you like. All those theories--they're all wrong. They're artificial--they smell of the lamp."
Glaisher laughed again.
"That's beyond me, that is."
"You men," said Harriet, "have let yourselves be carried away by all these figures and time-tables and you've lost sight of what you're really dealing with. But it's all machine-made. It creaks at every joint. It's like--like a bad plot, built up round an idea that won't work. ... when you come up against an inconsistency, you say: 'Oh, well--we'll get over that somehow. We'll make him do this. We'll make him do that.' But you can't make people do things to suit you--not in real life."
(HHC 331)
Now, I know
ajhalluk is going to protest that Sayers is doing exactly what she animadverts against here. Since I personally have very little ability to judge the credibility or otherwise of a plot like this (I mean, come on, I read John Dickson Carr by the bale. My tolerance for artificially contrived plots is right off the meter.), I'm not going to address the question of whether HHC's plot falls victim to the same problems it castigates its characters for. I'm simply going to note here, as I have noted elsewhere, that the process of constructing a detective novel is emphasized throughout HHC, as the detectives imagine scenario after scenario which might be the deep structure of the novel.In this same conversation/confrontation, Harriet again raises the specter of her own possible duality of role, as she did with Peter in "Evidence of Trouble Somewhere," envisioning an alternate version of HHC in which she is Murderer rather than Detective:
"Why, your original case against me was a better one."
Glaisher blinked, but took the thrust stolidly.
"Yes, miss. It had a lot to be said for it, that had."
"Of course. Why did you give it up, by the way?"
Some instinct seemed to warn Glaisher that he was treading on thin ice.
"Well," he said, "it seemed a bit too obvious, so to say."
(HHC 333)
Harriet proceeds viciously to outline the pieces of evidence against herself which, were she the murderer, the detective would either uncover or observe. But Glaisher gives the unanswerable response, in a Golden Age detective story: the obvious suspect (as Peter observes to Ferguson in The Five Red Herrings) is never the culprit. Like T5RH, in fact, HHC spins off any number of alternative versions of itself in its course through its own narrative.
I wish also to point out that the code used by the conspirators is one Wimsey had recently come across in a detective story (HHC 341).
And that brings us up through Ch. 27, which is where I said I wanted to get to. Go me. As predicted, not much argumentative structure here, but that's because mostly I'm following patterns I've already established in previous posts--which will likely continue to be the state of affairs until I've finished with HHC. Like Lord Peter, I believe in clearing trumps.
Next up, Have His Carcase 7.
---
WORKS CITED
Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, n.d.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-05-15 09:40 pm (UTC)I never got the feeling here that Harriet was either being slighted by Peter (or the, er, yokel) or slighting herself -- I rather felt that she summed up the situation and realized Peter would be the better person to handle this person.
The murderers here are not the Least Likely Suspect . . . They are both suspicious from the get-go and stay that way. I don't know what to make of this, but there it is.
Remember in GN, Peter says something to the effect of "I don't hold with motive -- when you know HOW, you know WHO." I see this as playing up to that. The reader (well, at least this reader) really wants Weldon to be the guilty party -- he's so awful, he must be a murderer! (Even Peter and Harriet voice this opinion, thus lending credence to the reader's feelings.) So the book is focused not on WHO, but on HOW, and that's reflected in the plotting within the plot. Peter and Umpelty and Glaisher are constantly dreaming up different versions of HOW, but they mostly revolve around Weldon and Bright/Morecambe (except for a few red-herring Perkins moments).
Here's a theory -- the plot of this novel is HOW -- only it's how one writes a mystery novel! You pick your victim and your guilty party in the beginning, and work out a plot from there, trying this and that until you find something that fits!
Also, I friended you so I can keep up with the fun. Hope you don't mind.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 09:48 am (UTC)Good gracious, of course not. Why on earth would I mind?
Many of DLS's novels are about HOW. Unnatural Death springs immediately to mind, and Whose Body? is much more about HOW than WHO, as is Murder Must Advertise, where WHO is almost irrelevant. Gaudy Night cares about WHO much mroe than HOW, but that's also partly because is no murder, and GN is far more interested in psychology than crime per se.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-15 11:15 pm (UTC)I thought it was rather his facility for verbal games, and how he sometimes uses them to go over the heads of people less intelligent than he, as with Helen in Busman's Honeymoon. Because he is skilled with music and words, just as he's afflicted with a heart and a head.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 09:50 am (UTC)Which is to say, yes, the doggerels are all about word-play and Peter's intellect running rings around everybody else's. But it is also his only association with music (aside from the dancing) in HHC, and that's weird.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 12:57 am (UTC)out loudin print for once.)By the way, in case it might be interesting to you, I noticed that earlier this year, Steve Brust made a blog entry about identifying with Harriet Vane (http://www.dreamcafe.com/weblog.cgi). (I think it's January 30, 2003. It's the one with a rant about role models or points of view or some such.) Just, like, you know, FYI, and all that. Dude.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 01:58 am (UTC)If the whole thing had been pure puppetry and clockwork, I'd have probably been bored by it. But I wouldn't have been annoyed by it.
I suppose, if you look at <i>Five Red Herrings</i> (which I like for purely sentimental reasons, and because much will be forgiven a book with such a glorious opening line) you could not have predicted that the author of that would have written <i>Gaudy Night</i> (I suspect there will be much fun when we get on to that book). In HHC you can see the potential being wasted.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 04:51 am (UTC)Erica
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 10:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-17 04:08 am (UTC)E.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-17 05:59 am (UTC)Like so many other things, the world of violets is clearly more complex and passionate than I had ever imagined.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 05:04 am (UTC)Or, to be specific, as I have never eaten violets, they have a scent and a taste reminiscent of the smell of violets.
I have no difficulty imagining someone making a scent that was like them, or a hair oil or whatever, but I've never come across one. It's possible that in the 1930s there was some fad for violets from Parma (where the ham comes from (1)) and there were all sorts of things scented and flavoured like that, and the sweets are the last remnants.
I could ask my aunt to send me some, but she'd think I'd gone nuts. If you'd asked this at Minicon, I bet
(1) I am taking the existence of a place called Parma as a likely corrolary of the ham not tasting of violets. It also took me several attempts at buying Black Forest Ham to discover that it wasn't supposed to taste of cherries, it just came from the Schwartzwald. I imagine Parma is in Italy, has a mild climate and an early spring, grey stone buildings only vaguely Italianate, an esplanade, a duck pond, woods, and is largely inhabited by exiles from Victorian England in bath chairs. In fact. I picture it as Grange Over Sands, only warmer, and smelling of Parma Violets.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 10:19 am (UTC)I love your envisioning of Parma.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-16 10:37 am (UTC)Oh! Those things! I like them too. They sold them at the Staten Island Ferry terminal, back when I visited PNH and TNH who lived there then. (Staten Island, not the ferry terminal.)
Parma violets
Date: 2003-05-16 02:50 pm (UTC)Now that I read closely, I think this is not the same thing as the candy from the Staten Island Ferry terminal, as that is more dissolve-y, more like... oh, bother, it's like glucose tablets (the orange ones, at least), or like a chalky wafer of sugary stuff, not as hard as Necco wafers (if you know what those are like, which you probably have no reason to), but sorta like them.
Or, to be specific, as I have never eaten violets, they have a scent and a taste reminiscent of the smell of violets.
Parma - its claim to fame
Date: 2004-02-24 09:19 am (UTC)Parma is indeed a real place, noted for its violets, its ham and its cheese (Parmesan). I don't know what it is "really" like, and prefer your version to mere reality, anyway.
This is particularly apt, as I'm sure there's a passage in Proust, possibly even in the first volume (I'm in the wrong place to check - sorry), where the narrator talks about his image of Parma, which is also violet-tinged. It's possible that Stendhal comes into it, too...
Parma Violets
Date: 2007-03-14 05:46 pm (UTC)Hey. I only discovered this forum recently (alas); I'm an American Anglophile literary aficionado, and Lord Peter/DL Sayers fan etc...
I also happen to have botanical interests and therefore understand the violet thing. Up to a point. I'm afraid I don't totally grok the period-cultural references that might fully inform the "Parma Violet" reference, but I can tell you that there *are* some violet flowers that have a decent scent (and I've noticed there are, or were, Crabtree & Evelyn products with violet scents), though I've gathered that, like lavender, the whole violet thing has become kind of an old-fashioned old-lady thing.
(though because of its medicinal virtues (pro-sleep, pro-good-dreams, anti-headache effects), lavender is having a bit of a revival)
I've grown some "Viola odorata" (i.e., scented violets) in my garden in the past. Though their scent isn't very intense, and you you have to get close to smell it, it is nice. They smell like Raspberry Kool-Aid. If you've ever smelled/tasted that, you know what I mean. If you don't, then find some raspberry Kool-Aid, or some Viola odorata, and see what I mean.
As a cultural aside, violet flowers (which have no toxic components and are edible) have also been used for many generations to make candy. If you soak violet flowers in saturated sugar syrup, and then let then dry out and crystallize, you get candied violet flowers -- which are used to decorate cakes and I assume taste rather like raspberry Kool-Aid.