KNOWLEDGE
Brian Evenson
In the detective novel I have yet to write, two corpses will be discovered in quite different locations, miles apart: one in a dumpster, the other in a hotel bathroom. Or one on the pier, the other in an alpine lodge. Or one dumped in a heap on the centerline of a country road, the other in a construction site under heaps of sawdust. Both bodies are strangled and have been scratched bloody on the face and arms.
On a hunch, the detective orders simultaneous and comparative testing done on the bodies. He learns from the pathologist that skin and tissue from each corpse is to be found under the fingernails of the other.
The two men’s pasts are thoroughly examined—no history of violence, no evidence they knew or had ever met one another. They worked in different cities, had dissimilar interests. Nobody has ever seen them together.
The detective postulates that someone else has killed them and made it look as if they killed each other. But the pathologist says no: the scratches appear natural, and there is forensic proof that they have been caused by each man’s actual fingernails. And the bruises on the necks of each seem to fit the other’s fingers perfectly.
The detective returns to the precinct, thinks his way into another hypothesis. He returns to the pathologist with the theory that someone else killed both men and then manipulated their hands to cause the scratches. The pathologist points out numerous factors that compromise this theory: the depth of the scratches, the nature of the bleeding, the position of the wounds, the difficulty of scratching with limp, recently dead fingers, the difficulty of scratching with fingers and arms beset by rigor mortis. In a carefully rendered scene, he will allow the detective to try to scratch one recently dead corpse with the hand of another recently dead corpse. The detective is convinced.
He spends more time thinking. All right, he finally suggests, though the two men had no history of violence and apparently didn’t know one another, they suddenly went mad and scratched and then strangled each other, and then were transported to different locations for unknown reasons by an unknown third party. The pathologist says he’s sorry, but this too is impossible. He goes on to provide proof, beginning with the traces of blood found on the floor beneath each scratched body, that each died where they fell. He piles proof upon proof until the detective, head slowly spinning, finds himself convinced that the two men must have flailed madly in the air, miles apart from one another, and somehow still scratched and strangled each other, as if a fold had occurred in space that allowed two non-adjacent spaces to be momentarily and uncannily adjacent.
“Is such a thing possible?” asks the detective.
The pathologist shrugs. “Not my area of expertise,” he claims.
The detective is flummoxed. He goes to the District Attorney and presents his dilemma: the two men seem not to have killed one another but neither seem to have been killed by anyone else. And yet both are dead.
No problem, claims the District Attorney, they killed each other. He signs a few papers, slips the case folder into the “solved” filing cabinet.
There is a blunt elegance to the district attorney’s decision, which flies in the face of the impossibility of all the facts. A blunt elegance in the way a simple statement—they killed each other—sweeps aside an unsolved crime and prevents the detective from slipping back into the haze. This the detective will, I suspect, find at once disturbing and somehow comforting: the district attorney’s statement acknowledges the murder to be an impossible act but an act nonetheless, and designates it a completed action that no longer needs to be considered. By decree and imprimatur it declares the problem solved, and sends it to oblivion.
True, the crime is perhaps not solved to the satisfaction of the detective or of the reader, but I myself am no longer interested in the crime so much as in what it can tell us about our characters. About the way the detective continues to feel both comforted and disturbed because, as a detective, his notion of knowledge is not in step with the contemporary world. For him, a fact is something to be ferreted out, something that exists but is hidden, veiled, beneath words, objects, bodies. Knowledge is an uncovering, a bringing to light of something that already exists, an exhumation of the Truth.
Admittedly, the district attorney’s notion of truth is even less in step with the contemporary world. It is decidedly medieval, a return to the parole du roi: the king speaketh, and thus maketh it so. The District Attorney, as an authority of law, has made a declaration, and by so doing has made what he declares the truth. The detective, of course, mistrusts this. And yet he will not know where else to go, for nothing the pathologist has told him about the bodies seems to provide him any other clue, to give him what he craves: a so-called real solution. Perhaps he will even come to suspect the district attorney of the murder in the hope of finding a solution. For instance, didn’t the district attorney say they killed each other far too quickly, as if he had something to hide? In any case, postulating the district attorney’s guilt does not explain the circumstances of the crime: the two bodies supposedly killing each other from widely different locations. It does not make these circumstances any less implausible.
Might I suggest that the detective is going about things all wrong? Rather than it being a question of knowing something in particular—of discovering or uncovering the key moment or fact—what is at stake is a question of regimes of knowledge (epistemes). It is an epistemological problem that demands one step outside one’s own episteme. The detective has almost done this, perhaps, in grudgingly accepting the district attorney’s statement, They killed each other, as a solution, but in beginning to suspect the district attorney of a hidden motive, he has re-entrenched himself in his own regime of knowledge. And besides, it is not the district attorney’s episteme that should concern him.
The detective’s episteme can be summarized as To know is to reveal the truth. The district attorney’s as To utter is to create the truth. Yet there is a third episteme suggested by words the pathologist has uttered in passing: “Not my area of expertise.” Here, Knowledge is control, a reservoir whose floodgates one either controls or doesn’t. Knowledge regulates flows of information.
The detective has accepted the pathologist’s expertise as a given. Indeed, the pathologist is hardly a character in most detective novels: he is simply a device for defining the parameters of the crime to be solved. He is an expression of an area of expertise, and within this area he functions with unquestioned authority. He is subject to question only by another individual in his area of expertise, the so-called second opinion. Indeed, the pathologist is the only person who could have made a solvable crime seem unsolvable.
Will the detective realize this? No. Why not? Because the pathologist has no motive. No matter how often the facts suggest, for both reader and detective, that only the pathologist could deliberately manipulate the facts of the crime to make it into a locked room dilemma, the detective will be unable to assign him a motive. For the detective, facts point to a stone that, when turned over with the tip of one’s boot, reveals something: guilt, madness, jealousy, greed, something. The only thing resembling a motive for the pathologist is to be found in his belief that Knowledge is control. Asked if the two crimes have anything in common, he has chosen to interpret them to suggest that they have everything in common while at the same time developing the scenario in such a way as to make the crime unsolvable within the detective’s regime of knowledge. What is at stake here is the dependence of one episteme on another, and on the pathologist being the only one to truly understand this. The pathologist understands that he maintains the greatest power by giving the impression that he has opened the floodgates of knowledge while actually diverting this flow and offering something else in its place. But why withhold this particular knowledge? Simply because he can. Why he would choose to misdirect the flow of information at this particular moment in regard to this particular crime is less a question of motive than a question of hydraulics.
No detective can truly understand this, both he and his genre are hopelessly out of date, his episteme nostalgic. Even if the detective does, by some stroke of genius, suddenly understand it, he will understand it only in terms of his own episteme—hidden/revealed, innocence/guilt, motive/lack of motive—rather as for what it actually is, a question of hydraulics. The detective genre belongs only to one episteme, To Know is to reveal the Truth, and attempts to substitute another way of thinking about knowledge always end up derailing the genre. The best we can hope for is to reach a point where the crime is deemed unsolvable, where nothing is known or understood—a state of dogged and stubborn insistence on the detective’s episteme despite that episteme’s impotence in making sense of the world around him.
Which is precisely why I have still not written my mystery novel.