Elaine
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FWS:
The Mysteries in the Story
Todorov’s Visual “Typology of Detective Fiction”
Tzvetan
Todorov, in “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966), analyzes the genre of
mystery stories and identifies the subgenres that are part of mystery
literature. He broadly subdivides the mystery genre into three: whodunit,
thriller, and suspense. There is a time sequence among these subgenres.
Whodunit comes first with examples of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle. Thriller and suspense stem from the whodunit and preserve some of the
major skeletons of its form, but each develops a characteristic of its own. The
development of these subgenres is not of a linear form. In fact, Todorov
writes: “It is quite difficult to say whether the forms we have just described
correspond to the stages of an evolution or else can exist simultaneously”
(51-52). To represent his idea of the development and the coexistence of the
subgenres, a three-dimensional folding cube form is applied instead of a
standard linear timeline form, with each side of the folding cube showing
either the subgenre or an example of the subgenre.
Besides
the title, the cube opens to a side with eight small squares, which are divided
into four of black backgrounds and four of white backgrounds. According to Todorov, a whodunit has “two stories: the
story of the crime and the story of the investigation” (44). The crime story is
represented in black. Images of dead body, blood, murder weapon, and various
clues are used to indicate that the black portion of the cube facet is the
crime story. The white background, consequently, represents the investigation.
In whodunits, there is always a friend of the detective who writes a book of
the detective’s investigation; there is an image of a book behind a speech
bubble, which is what the detective is saying. The detective is immune, which
means that he does not have to fight the murderer or feel life-threatened in
any way. Therefore the detective is simply dictating his interpretation of the
crime to the friend, who then writes it into a book.
The cube then opens to a new side,
also with eight black or white squares; this time, the side shows the different
examples of whodunits that have been studied in class. Poe writes: “The
whodunit thus tends toward a purely geometric architecture…” (45) Therefore
each segment is divided into two right triangles of different color, black
representing the murder and white representing the investigation. On the left,
there is The Murders in the Rue Morgue
by Edgar Allan Poe. The orangutan and the chimney in the black background
portray the murder of the woman and the daughter, where the orangutan stuffs
the daughter up the chimney. Then, there is the detective with his friend
listening to his story. The rule of hieratic scale is applied here; Dupin, the
detective, is larger than the friend, the narrator, to show his importance.
Similarly, on the right side of the facet there is The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. The submarine plan and
a train on the black triangle show the murder of Cadogen West, whose body has
been pushed onto a train. Similar to The
Murders in the Rue Morgue, Holmes is drawn larger than his friend, Dr.
Watson, on the white triangle, which is representative of the investigation part
of the whodunit story.
When the cube is split into half
from that point, a side with four red squares appears to portray a new
subgenre, the thriller. The difference in the squares’ background color shows
that this side represents a different subgenre. The main characteristics of the
thriller are “violence – in all its forms, and especially the most shameful –
beatings, killings… [And] love – preferably vile – violent passion, implacable
hatred” (48). The red background represents the passion and heated ambience of
a thriller story. The knife, gun, and fist are representative of violence, and
the silhouette of a couple is representative of the passionate love.
Unfortunately, none of the text that was studied in class could be definitely
classified as a thriller, so there is no facet dedicated to an example.
The four-squared red facet opens up
to an eight-side again, now with a grey background to indicate another subgenre
change. The squares with the grey background represent suspense stories. The
suspense “keeps the mystery of the whodunit… but refuses to reduce the second
to a simple detection of the truth” (50). Therefore, the black and white colors
of the whodunit are mixed to yield grey. The eight squares are split into four
and four, each group of four representing a different type of suspense. The top
shows a heavy-built, tough detective with a gun pointed at his head. This shows
“the story of the vulnerable detective” where “the detective loses his
immunity, gets beaten up, badly hurt, constantly risks his life” (51). On the
bottom, there is a man, the protagonist, running away from the police. The
“Wanted” poster shows the same man as the one who is running. This is “the
story of the suspect-as-detective”, where all the evidence point to the protagonist
as the criminal and the protagonist must risk his life in trying to find the
truth to prove his innocence (51). The suspense stories preserve the murder and
the investigation from the whodunits, but now the detectives have lost the
immunity.
Finally, the cube opens to the last facet
with eight grey squares to show the examples of suspense mysteries studied in
class. Again, the eight squares are split into two parts. The top, The Maltese Falcon, has a big picture of
Sam Spade’s face. In the book, Spade’s physical features are described with a
v-motif and heavy build, which account for his boldness and toughness.
Therefore, his facial features are displayed largely on the facet to emphasize
his tough characteristic. The police car in the background indicates which type
of suspense story The Maltese Falcon is:
the story of the suspect-as-detective. Spade is wrongly accused of his partner
Archer’s death, and the police car distinguishes The Maltese Falcon from the other type of suspense story. The bottom
shows The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
The German flag portrays the story’s setting in East Germany during the cold
war. The facet in general portrays the highest point of the story’s plot, when
Leamas and Liz are climbing over the wall and are shot to death. That scene
shows both the violence and love that are present not only in thrillers but
also in suspense stories.
Although each segment of the cube
shows a different subgenre distinguished by the color of the background, all
the facets come together to form a single cube. The subgenres do not exist in a
horizontal line, where the later stories do not relate back to the earlier
ones. Instead, in this three-dimensional format, it is easier to see that there
are common themes that hinge the different stories together, as the small cubes
are hinged together to form the big cube. Todorov’s three forms of mystery
stories – whodunit, thriller, and suspense – “coexist today” (52) as shown by
the Visual Typology of Detective Fiction.
Work Cited
Todorov,
Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University
Press, 1977. Print.
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