I was recently reading a brief critique of the 1619 Project by Phillip W. Magness and I was a bit troubled by something he says about the misuse of a 1944 book by Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. Apparently writers of what’s called the New History of Capitalism often refer to Williams’ book to support their thesis that capitalism today is a natural outgrowth of the plantation slave system in the United States, when in fact what Williams meant was something nearly the opposite. “If anything,” Magness writes, “they cite it for its pairing of the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘slavery’ and then unintentionally invert its thesis.”

The suggestion, and Magness is not alone in making it, is that NHC scholars haven’t actually read Williams’ book but only grabbed hold of the title. This brought home to me an issue in the Humanities that has been growing for some time now. The basic problem is this: no person can hope to read more than a small fraction of everything that has been published on any given subject. Also, because of the way scholarly research is supposed to work, most of one’s research has to be given over to staying up-to-date and reading only recently published work. This may be part of the reason why the New History of Capitalism has been accused of being a silo, failing to engage with other work in the field. It also may explain why so few people have actually read a book written nearly 80 years ago. As scholarship advances (at least in theory) a lot of previous research just drops off into the abyss of the unread. It’s a great forgetting.

What Magness says reminded of a similar feeling I had when reading the chapter on King Lear in Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All. Garber cites very few secondary sources in her book. Indeed, in her essay on Lear she only references one:  an essay by Henry Turner that appeared in the journal Renaissance Drama in 1997. But why, I wondered, did she even bother? The point that the note provides authority for is wholly parenthetical: that in the text of the play the heath Lear rages on is never called a “heath.” The implication seems to be that nobody had noticed this before Turner, but in fact it’s long been common knowledge. It’s a point that A. C. Bradley mentions in passing in his Shakespearean Tragedy. Bradley’s book, however, is old. It first came out in 1904. So it doesn’t get cited.

I’m sure Garber has read Bradley. But Shakespeare is a good, perhaps the best, example of what I’m talking about here. Even fifty years ago it was understood that nobody could ever hope to read everything that had been and was being written on Shakespeare. As a result, there’s a cull when it comes to scholarship, which in turn means that wheels keep getting reinvented.

I think Garber citing a modern source for what was a commonplace observation more than a century ago is an interesting instance of how these things drop off the radar. I’ve often found myself reading contemporary literary criticism, or listening to a lecture or podcast, and thinking that the author or lecturer was saying nothing new while wondering if they were aware of that fact. It seems to me that a lot of American literary criticism in particular has now forgotten classic interpretive works from the mid-twentieth century, especially since author criticism and close reading has gone so much out of fashion. Large swathes of the Humanities now seem to be engaged in this great forgetting. It helps people get published, but it also leads to embarrassing mishaps like the kind Magness describes.

I guess this one is from the Maigret files before he retired, because otherwise I don’t know why he’d be on holiday. Either way, it’s not much of a getaway since Madame Maigret immediately comes down with appendicitis, which lands her in hospital for surgery. While visiting her there the Chief gets drawn into yet another squalid, and murderous, family drama.

Unlike Saint-Aubin in Inspector Cadaver, in the seaside town of Les Sables d’Olonne everybody knows who Maigret is. Unfortunately, this turns out to be just as irritating as not having anyone recognize him. Celebrity is tough.

Good atmosphere that I thought was building up to something special but it kind of fizzles at the end. I’m not really sure what clues Maigret was drawing on, or if he was just following his inimitable “method” of putting in the legwork, knocking on doors and interviewing subjects, until the solution reveals itself. “Had he ever bothered with footprints?” he wonders at one point. Probably not. Or fingerprints. He has almost no interest in forensics. Certainly far less than Sherlock Holmes or Charlie Chan. This leaves an awful lot up to intuition. But then he’s French.

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Over at the Canadian Notes & Queries website my review of Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall is up. Interesting book for fans of bent, supernatural stuff.

I’m not sure what it’s specifically responding to, but the genre of Weird fiction is really having a moment. A few years ago I had a piece in the Literary Review of Canada on the direction things were heading that talked a bit about this. Seems like the kind of thing that scholars might want to look into, if that’s the sort of thing scholars still do.

You can take Maigret out of Paris, and even out of France, but wherever he goes he’s still investigating the same sort of crimes using the same method. Even in NYC we have “the social mechanism” at work: a great fortune rooted in a historical crime that will only gradually come to the surface. Then, when it’s time for wrapping up, Maigret will realize that nothing has been accomplished so he’ll just let things go.

Maigret is out of his element in the Big Apple but he sticks to his plan of putting in lots of plodding footwork until the solution comes to him. “I let myself drift with the current, clutching here and there on a passing branch.” Which is actually a pretty good way of going at things. Claiming that he knows nothing (until he knows everything) is the same as saying that he likes to keep an open mind. The problem with most police investigations that go wrong is developing tunnel vision in the early going.

I thought that there might be some connection made to Cécile is Dead because in that novel an American had come to Paris to study Maigret’s method and Maigret looks up an American he’d met in France a few years earlier when he comes to New York. But they are different people (in Cécile is Dead the American had been Spencer Oats of the Philadelphia Institute of Criminology, while here it’s Special Agent O’Brien of the FBI). Also of some assistance is another one of those weird secondary characters scattered throughout the series, in this instance a sad, alcoholic former clown named Ronald Dexter. He makes up for the fact that the villains of the piece are mostly kept off-stage and aren’t very interesting anyway. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure at the end what wickedness had happened all those years ago. But, much like Maigret himself in the end, I didn’t care a whole lot either.

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New word day! Fossick. Was stumped by this one when it came up in John Man’s The Gutenberg Revolution. Man uses it for the act of searching through a library. Apparently it’s a bit of Australian or New Zealand slang originally referring to looking for gold or gems by picking over abandoned mine workings. Its more general meaning is to search for by rummaging around. “Rummage” actually has a strange etymology as well, having its roots in a Middle English word for the stowing of cargo.

I don’t know why I can’t read philosophy. I find the subject matter interesting. And I can read about philosophy. I like books pitched at a general audience and surveys running from Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy to Anthony Gottlieb’s more recent The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment. But when it comes the primary texts I find I can’t get more than a few pages — and I mean that literally I’m lucky to make it to page 3 — into works like Spinoza’s Ethics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Most of Plato outside of the shorter dialogues is a tough slog and Aristotle even harder. Hegel and Wittgenstein I’ve given up on. The Pragmatists are more approachable, but I still find myself just wanting a précis or a book about them so that I don’t have to bother reading what they actually wrote.

I wonder if this is why Existentialism became so popular. I do like reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche most of the time, and Dostoyevsky and Camus were first-rate novelists. I read all these guys, and Sartre, because I enjoy them. The rest of the philosophical tradition comes to me by way of the aforementioned general histories and listening to lectures.

Some of this might be a temperamental difference. I didn’t care about literary theory or the philosophy of language when I was at school, and I still don’t. I found most of it both impenetrable and, what was even worse, irrelevant to any deeper understanding of the literature I was studying. But I do find broader questions about subjects like ethics and epistemology interesting. I’m at least curious about a lot of what philosophy does, or used to do.

I’m left to wonder though if I’m really missing anything by just reading summaries of these other major works rather than trying to engage with them directly. I think anyone who tries to get by reading a summary (most likely a Wikipedia page) on Paradise Lost is never going to understand the poem at all. Is the same the case with not reading Quine?

This is a question that bothers me a bit, but at this point I just have to accept that I’ve given up on reading much philosophy. I’m going to have to engage with these thinkers second-hand. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to figure them out on their own terms. Maybe I don’t have the attention span necessary to follow them (I like to browse Schopenhauer’s aphorisms, but have never tackled The World as Will and Idea). Or maybe philosophers just can’t express themselves clearly enough, or in a way that’s interesting enough, to make me want to pursue them any further. Life is short, and getting shorter all the time.

I don’t know if there’s a through narrative holding all of these Maigret novels together. As this one begins he’s two years into his retirement. Was this his second retirement? I wonder if anyone has worked out a Maigret chronology. They probably have but I’m too lazy to look for it. [Note: This is an issue that’s later addressed in Maigret’s Memoirs, where “Maigret” complains about the way Simenon jumbles up the chronology of his life.] I also wonder if the mention of an earlier investigation in the Haute Seine was a reference to Lock No. 1. How well do these books hold together?

In any event, Maigret gets tempted out of retirement here not by the big pile of money he’s offered but because the case interests him. Soon, however, it disgusts him. It’s yet another case involving “the social mechanism,” a.k.a. “the dodgy dealings of those who [grow] rich.” Ernest Malik is one such riser, and as so often happens (see what I said in my notes on The Cellars of the Majestic) he’s done it in ways that at best show a lack of scruple.

The crimes are described as a “vile business, which, from start to finish, was all a filthy matter of money.” If you’re born with money you’re decadent; if you have to get it you’re a crook. Either way, money just provides a sham façade to hide family skeletons behind. “For that is all there was behind those beautiful houses with their immaculate gardens: money!” Note how, at the beginning, the lady who hires Maigret mistakes him for a gardener. Detective or gardener, in either role he’s just cleaning up after rich people. I’m not surprised he’s sick of it.

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A weak entry. It had promise as something a little different, with Maigret’s adversary not being the killer (who never even appears on stage) but a young woman with an imagination shaped by romance and detective fiction. Set in the “make-believe village” of a retirement community full of “toy houses” (not unlike how our hero saw the town of Delfzijl in A Crime in Holland) the potential for some kind of postmodern Maigret was there. But the events are far-fetched and the resolution just a confusing whirl of telephone calls describing actions that are hard to follow. In the end I wasn’t sure how seriously Simenon wanted us to take it. The character of Félicie is problematic to say the least, but Maigret adores her. Should we? To only be amused at her behaviour strikes me as little better than the delight the decadent heiress has in the machinations of Madame Le Cloagulen in Signed, Picpus. Is their only difference one of class?

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Either these books are growing on me or they’re getting better. Or perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Inspector Cadaver has a lot of familiar ingredients. We begin with Maigret taking another trip out of Paris to visit a provincial town that he finds disturbingly alien and depressing. Saint-Aubin is a typical Maigret destination in its crappy weather and secretive attitude toward outsiders. Worst of all, “As for his name, who knew if anyone had heard of it in this village surrounded by slimy bogs and pools of stagnant water?” Not heard of Maigret!

Looking out on the empty, rainswept streets and “houses like blind people,” Maigret is driven to wonder at how there are people who spend their whole lives in Saint-Aubin. But by the end of his visit he will experience a remarkable moment of epiphany: “Now he was almost like God the Father. He knew this village as if he had lived there, or better still, as if he had created it. All the life going on in these small low houses hidden in the dark was familiar to him.” Try keeping your dirty little secrets from God!

Also carrying over from the other novels is the interest in looking behind the façade of bourgeois life (those blind houses, those twitching curtains). There’s always something nasty going on in these sleepy little towns, some dark secrets being kept. Also, as in The Yellow Dog and The Misty Harbour, the notion of justice being done is stretched quite a ways. Only, as in Signed, Picpus, here it’s less about being forgiving than it is a cynical shrug at the evil of the world. What’s the point of holding the leading citizens of Saint-Aubin to account? What good would it do? As for poor Albert Retailleau, he suffers a fate not unlike that of his father, killed off by accident and converted into a payout to his mom. He is, in fact, the story’s punchline: “There’s always got to be some poor fellow who carries the can for everyone else!” Ha-ha! The leading citizens are then free to head to Argentina, where they can enjoy lives of wealth and decadence in a place where it doesn’t rain so much.

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A game of connect-the-dots so playfully rendered I have to wonder if Simenon was just having a bit of fun with these stories now. How far was his tongue in his cheek when he served up this description of the chief inspector: “In the course of his thirty years in the job, Maigret has seen all kinds of everything. He has sniffed the air and smelled the odour of human passions, vices, crimes and manias, the entire ferment of massed humanity.”

All the fun and games come to a dark end indeed though, as this is the most bitterly ironic of all these novels thus far. Madame Le Cloagulen is a figure so vicious the other characters, including Maigret himself, are shocked that she can even exist. She is unnatural, a harpy, someone who leaves Maigret at a loss for words. He can only expostulate “What a bitch . . .” And yet even though he “has it in for her” his plans to nail her for something other than walling her dead husband up fail in the face (and laughter) of an insouciant heiress. Maigret’s “amazing intuition, his frightening ability to put himself in the shoes of other people” isn’t up to the task of dealing with either woman. Perhaps because they are women? I don’t think that’s quite right. But they are modern women, and that’s something he doesn’t seem capable or willing to understand.

Maigret index