The exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin's optical detective

Boundary 2

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 105-129

  Gunning, Tom ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950342038     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-30-1-105     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (39)

1. These oneiric objects are described in André Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 39-40;
2. in Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 32-37.
3. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), L1a, 1. Hereafter, this work is cited paren-thetically as AP and by convolute.
4. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Press, 1977), 123-25.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic, trans, and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 42.
6. See AP, 388-89, 464, 844, and 912.
7. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 10-11.
8. Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty," trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996-), 2:734. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SW.
9. Walter Benjamin, "Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poetin the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso Editions, 1983), 69;
10. Benjamin, "Paris of the Second Empire," 48-54.
11. See, as well, my discussion of this in my essay, "From Kaleidoscope to X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin and Traffic in Souls (1913)," Wide Angled, no. 4 (1999): 25-63.
12. Carlo Ginsburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96-125.
13. This culminating scene appears in scene 14 of the Charles Laughton translation, Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 5, ed. Ralph Mannheim and John Willett (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 465-67.
14. G. W. Leibniz, "Monadology," in Philosophical Texts, trans, and ed. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 268.
15. Leibniz, "Monadology," 275.
16. See, for instance, the insightful treatment of Green by Catherine Ross Nickerson, in The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 59-116.
17. This is the conclusion of traditional historians of the detective story, as well, such as A. E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1958), 158-64.
18. Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera (London: W. H. Allen, 1985), 225, 259-60.
19. Miriam Hansen has pointed out to me the resonance that this discussion of mirrors has with Siegfried Kracauer's essay "Photography." One might recall, in particular, the phrase "Nothing of these contains us and the photograph gathers fragments around a nothing," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans, and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 56. Again, this raises the issues of the optics of modernity.
20. Leroux, Phantom, 246; emphasis in original.
21. Examples can be found in Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Reigate Puzzle," in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday and Co., 1930), 401, 410;
22. "The Naval Treaty," 451;
23. "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," 512, 515, 516, 526;
24. "The Adventure of the Priory School," 545;
25. "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez," 610;
26. "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter," 625-26.
27. The original Strand illustrations by Sidney Paget are reproduced in The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 1976).
28. Anna Katharine Green, The Leavenworth Case (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), 6, 166-67, 210, 220.
29. Nickerson, Web, 77.
30. Gaston Leroux, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 32, 90;
31. The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Sawry: Dedalus, 1998), 56, 59.
32. Anna Katharine Green, The Woman in the Alcove (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1906), 19. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as WA.
33. Leroux, Perfume, 45.
34. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 17:248.
35. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 236-37.
36. See Régis Messac, Le "Detective Novel" et l'influence de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Librarie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929);
37. Siegfried Kracauer, Der Detektiv-Roman, in Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971).
38. The primary application of Foucault to the detective novel has been made in D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
39. Clearly what I have described in this essay as the uncanny or dialectical optic of the detective relates to what Benjamin describes as the "optical unconscious" in both his "Work of Art" essay and the "Short History of Photography." But I claim that, in pondering the detective and the arcade, Benjamin finds in the optic not simply an experience but the basis of a method of analysis embodied in The Arcades Project itself. Clearly this method bears a profound relation to what he describes as "the mimetic faculty" and the concept Miriam Hansen has isolated in his work of "innervation" (see Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One Way Street," Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 [winter 1999]: 306-43). However, I believe that this uncanny optics represents a method both intimately related to these other terms and yet not strictly identical to them.