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Murder: The State of the Art Author(s): Joel Black Source: American Literary History, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 780-793 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490202 Accessed: 08-09-2016 16:44 UTC

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Murder: The State of the Art Joel Black

A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Murder Most Foul: The

Killer and the American

Gothic Imagination By Karen Halttunen Harvard University Press, 1998

Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life By Sara L. Knox Duke University Press, 1998

Serial Killers. Death and

Life in America's Wound Culture

By Mark Seltzer Routledge, 1998

No other act so flagrantly exposes the contradictions lying just beneath the surface of American culture the way murder does. Typically occurring in industrialized, urban environments, American violence appears as a regressive phenomenon, a re- minder of the savage brutality and primitivism that made the US such a modern, progressive nation in the first place. Then there is the mass media's role to be considered-even as (or because) it's depicted everywhere as news, art, and entertainment, murder somehow remains unrepresentable and unreal. By making mur- der a public spectacle, the media fail on the one hand to convey the private and intimate nature of death, and they fail on the other hand to make violence sufficiently sensational for their in- creasingly desensitized and anesthetized viewers. As for medical and legal experts, their special interest in murder is belied by the pretense of professional disinterest on which their authority rests. Finally there is the paradox that as the most abhorrent of crimes, homicide is routinely punished by execution: by killing the killer, the American criminal justice system essentially as- sumes the murderer's own role.

Contradictions such as these tend to be overlooked by sci- entific studies which consider murder a sociological, pathologi- cal, or criminological problem to be analyzed, explained, and resolved. For some time there has been a pressing need for stud- ies that approach murder as a cultural phenomenon and that recognize its inseparability from the plethora of mass-mediated representations of violence circulating throughout American society. Fortunately, we now have three works, all published in 1998, that adopt such an approach. Both Karen Halttunen's Murder Most Foul. The Killer and the American Gothic Imagina- tion and Sara L. Knox's Murder. A Tale of Modern American Life

? 2000 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY

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American Literary History 781

treat murder first and foremost as a story that, in Halttunen's words, "involves a fictive process, which reveals much about the mental and emotional strategies employed within a given histori- cal culture for responding to serious transgression in its midst" (2). Indeed, the phenomenon that Knox calls the "transmutation of event into narrative" (193) takes on a new importance when the event in question happens to be murder, and especially actual murders that are endlessly retold in the popular, contemporary, and above all fictive mode that has misleadingly come to be des- ignated true crime. Alternatively, Mark Seltzer's Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture takes up this sensa- tional criminal class as a symptom of a hypertrophied American society that cannot be reduced to any conventional notion of representation or narrative. How can the murderous subject's story be told when his identity and even his individuality is not easily specified, when the presence of this virus lurking amid the algorithms of mass-mediated culture can only begin to be de- tected after a series of apparently random, violent eruptions in the systemic order?

Despite their concern with entirely distinct periods of American history, Halttunen and Knox take a similar approach to their subject. Both authors focus on the literary and cultural conventions at work in American murder narratives, critiquing, as Knox writes, the "generic conventions of the tale of murder" (145), or in Halttunen's case, the "set of conventions surrounding the collective response to murder-conventions that run so deep in modern liberal culture that they appear to be natural, instinc- tive, when in fact they are historically contingent" (6). Halttu- nen's thesis that a decisive shift in the discourse of murder took

place in eighteenth-century New England is elegant and power- ful. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, she shows that the dominant form of murder narratives at the beginning of the century was the quasi-sacred, oral genre of the execution ser- mon, delivered on the occasion of the condemned individual's being put to death. By century's end, however, as "lawyers took over from clergymen the primary responsibility for crafting tales of murder in American culture" (116), the execution sermon was succeeded by secular, printed, and sensational accounts of crimi- nal biographies and murder trials. This shift from a religious to a legalistic and literary discourse marked a gradual but permanent change in how Americans thought about the figure of the mur- derer-from a common sinner whose only difference from the rest of the community was that his or her innate depravity had inexorably escalated to the crime of murder, to a moral monster isolated from the community by disease rather than united to it

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782 Murder: The State of the Art

by depravity, one whose actions were fundamentally unnatural, inhuman, and incomprehensible. No longer concerned with the spiritual condition of the murderer whose execution provided the occasion for "all New Englanders to look sin in the face- the face of the convicted criminal before them-and see in that

face a mirror image of themselves" (29), the moder public devel- oped a Gothic fascination with the horrific and mysterious cir- cumstances of the crime itself, and came to view the murderer as a "moral alien" separated form the "normal and law-abiding" community by a "great gulf" (235). While "Gothic horror made murder unspeakable" and "an endless ritual ... without moral comprehension," "Gothic mystery made the crime unknowable" and a ritual resistant to "narrative closure" (133).

One problem with charting the development of a cultural phenomenon like a literary genre or a social movement is that it's easy to focus on the clearly defined initial and final stages, and to lose sight of the comparatively muddled middle phase which often happens to be the most dynamic and interesting part of the process. In the course of tracing the transition from seven- teenth-century execution sermons to nineteenth-century murder narratives, Halttunen makes several passing references to the in- termediary form of appendices to the sermons, in which more detailed accounts of the circumstances of the killer's crimes were

given (49, 52, 55, 91). Of great interest from a literary perspec- tive, these appendices warrant closer attention. Their most im- portant literary counterpart may well be the 1854 "Postscript" to Thomas De Quincey's earlier murder essays which vividly de- scribes John Williams's cold-blooded slaughter of two English families in 1811. As for the transition Halttunen traces from the

killer as a common sinner to a moral monster, once again these two extremes would seem to be of less interest than the interme-

diary view-namely, the Enlightenment conception of the killer as an essentially free and rational individual whose crimes are the result of some intelligible motive. This "prevailing rational view of human nature" was challenged by "the apparent pur- poselessness" of particularly brutal slayings in which "murderers killed out of unexplainable compulsion"(45-46); such atrocities, Halttunen argues, opened the way for the Gothic "cult of hor- ror" and the image of the murderer as moral alien (53).

Even as the Gothic murder narrative affirmed a notion of

"unnatural crime" that "violated" the prevailing view of funda- mentally rational human nature (133), it actually supported rather than supplemented that Enlightenment view by designat- ing the murderer as a deviant who either had to be quarantined as a madman through incarceration or eliminated from society

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American Literary History 783

once and for all through execution. Observing that the Gothic sensibility "was not a remnant of an older, religious sense of hu- man depravity" (239), nor was it "an irrational reaction against an excess of Enlightenment rationalism" (59), Halttunen provoc- atively insists that it was an "incongruous" (239) but "indispens- able" (59) "corollary to the modem liberal view of human nature introduced by the Enlightenment" (239). Through the principal Gothic categories of mystery and horror, modern proponents of secular rationalism found a way "to express and reinforce the inexplicability of radical human evil" (242)-and to uphold En- lightenment values in the process.

Whether or not one accepts Halttunen's argument that the civilizing forces of Enlightenment humanitarianism engendered, and were subsequently energized by, the demons of Gothic sensa- tionalism, or her assumption of an inverse relation between so- cial repression and graphic representation ("in an era when many mundane bodily practices-elimination, noseblowing and spit- ting, sexual activities, dying itself-were being privatized in ser- vice to the civilizing process, the literature of body-horror fully exposed the process by which murder victims' bodies were dam- aged, dismembered, and medically disembowelled" [79]), her de- lineation of these cultural conflicts helps to explain America's contradictory attitudes to murder. We are made aware of the de- gree to which the genres of horror and murder mystery are in- formed by a Gothic sensibility, while noting the Enlightenment principles at work in detective fiction and in accounts of criminal investigation. Through an ongoing process of life imitating art, eighteenth-century Gothic fiction provided the basis for the nineteenth-century nonfictional murder narrative, which in turn anticipated Edgar Allan Poe's "invention" of detective fiction (a genre, we are told, that is "a fantasized solution to the problem of moral uncertainty in the world of true crime" [131]), and even the "invention" of the professional detective himself (110). And we recognize that the Enlightenment endeavor to explain the murderer's deed was by no means abandoned after running up against inexplicable acts of violence, but has continued to flour- ish well into our own time-a fact ably demonstrated by Knox in the case of analytical murder narratives composed by psycho- logical experts like Dr. Fredric Wertham and judicial authorities like Judge Curtis Bok.

The "apparent purposelessness" of cold-blooded killings that so baffled and challenged Enlightenment researchers had yet another significant effect on European and American culture that is too often overlooked. As De Quincey was among the first to acknowledge, such purposeless crimes had a disturbing but

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784 Murder. The State of the Art

The ideal solution to the

Gothic (or aesthetic) view of murder, in other

words, would be to bring the execution sermon

back into circulation, but

somehow to find a way to remove its call for the

death penalty as a necessary consequence.

undeniable affinity with late-eighteenth-century accounts of aes- thetic disinterestedness (especially those by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller), which recognized that contemplation of the beautiful entailed the imagination's free play and the individual's temporary suspension from cognitive rules and moral-rational laws. The resemblance between the disinterestedness of the aes-

thete/artist and the motivelessness of the cold-blooded killer led

De Quincey to formulate his outrageous but prophetic thesis of murder as an art form. Gothic narrative's demonizing of the killer as an inhuman deviant may have resulted from the failure of both religious and rationalist attempts to account for murder- ous violence as Halttunen suggests, but for writers of a more literary bent, the demonized murderer mirrored the artist's own ostracized condition as an alienated and disinterested immoral-

ist. The aesthetic aspect of murder underlying what Halttunen calls "the pornography of violence" results in that most per- plexing paradox in murder studies: "the growing allure of the murderer" despite the horror of his or her deeds (88).

By way of counteracting the aesthetic appeal of Gothic murder narratives and the related emotional satisfaction many feel in society's extermination of its most violent criminals, Halt- tunen reserves the final pages of her study to express her aversion to the Gothic view of criminals as moral monsters. Allying her- self with Sister Helen Prejean (author of Dead Man Walking [1993]) in her case against capital punishment, Halttunen urges a return to the earlier ethical, if not spiritual, view expressed in the "long-outmoded genre of the execution sermon" of the crimi- nal as one of us, a man and not a devil who is just as "subject to sin" as we are (250). The problem with such a return to the Puri- tan recognition of the murderer's humanity and evil's universal- ity, of course, is that far from doing away with the death penalty, it requires it. Like Prejean, Halttunen would like to restore the "views on crime" expressed in the seventeenth-century execution sermon while dispensing with its "views on punishment" (249). The ideal solution to the Gothic (or aesthetic) view of murder, in other words, would be to bring the execution sermon back into circulation, but somehow to find a way to remove its call for the death penalty as a necessary consequence.

That this is not likely to happen anytime soon is made clear by Knox, who is even more vocal than Halttunen in her opposi- tion to capital punishment. Knox's analysis rests largely on a specialized definition of the tale of murder, a seemingly nontech- nical term which is said to consist "both of all other murders,

known and unknown, for which the principals were responsible and the life stories that, as they are told, lead to the execution of

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American Literary History 785

their subjects" (242). According to this definition-which is bur- ied in footnote 19-a murder narrative, whether fictional or non- fictional, can be considered a tale of murder only if it culminates in the killer's execution.' While this definition holds true for most

cases discussed in Knox's study, such a qualification drastically limits the number and type of narratives that can be considered murder tales. Neither Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punish- ment (1866) nor the histories of Charles Manson or even Jeffrey Dahmer fit the definition. Many of the Gothic narratives dis- cussed by Halttunen would not fit either, although the execution sermons obviously would, and what is more, would appear to be exemplary American tales of murder. Indeed, Knox's insight into the significance of execution in the modern American tale of murder finds support in Halttunen's historical research, which reveals the execution sermon to be "the predominant form of criminal narrative" in "late seventeenth-and early eighteenth- century New England" (11) and which identifies this genre as "a major expression of the jeremiad, the predominant literary form of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century" (22).2 The emphasis given by Knox to execution as a constituent event in the twentieth-century tale of murder would thus seem to be an uncanny instance of the return of the repressed.

Knox's idiosyncratic definition of the tale of murder reveals what she finds to be so distinctively American about the genre: this nation's persistent demand for capital punishment, "not merely as 'just punishment,' deterrence, or retribution, but as an- alogical closure to the forever open-ended tale of murder" (195). Her study implies that as long as most Americans continue with such avidity to produce and consume tales of murder, they will continue to require the execution of convicted killers as the only means of bringing these tales to an aesthetically, as well as ethi- cally, satisfying conclusion. Conversely, doing away with the death penalty would seem to entail doing away with the tale of murder itself.

While Halttunen documents how many of the conventions found in Gothic fiction ("veiled ladies, disappearing corpses, in- trusions of the supernatural, the dead returned to life" [116], and "terrible evils practiced in private space" [124]) were used to give "meaning and coherence to nineteenth-century [nonfictional] murder narratives" (116), Knox shows how twentieth-century true-crime writers exploited the conventions of romance narra- tive-especially the conundrum of origins and the "structure of portent" (140). For all their artificiality, such conventions were useful in inducing not only a kind of willing suspension of disbe- lief in readers, but a compulsive interest on their part. Yet be-

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786 Murder. The State of the Art

cause real-life murderers in these modern narratives invariably failed to measure up to the fictional heroes or heroines of ro- mance, any allure they might have had was lost on the press and the public. This was especially evident in the case of Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez, to whom Knox devotes no less than three chapters. Dubbed by the mid-century press as the "Lonely Hearts" or "Honeymoon Killers" for their routine of exploiting vulnerable women in search of love, Beck and Fernandez became

the subjects of a story that was endlessly retold-and the agents of murders that were endlessly "reauthor[ed]" (9)-by true-crime writers who portrayed them as a grotesque parody of the postwar American romance, emphasizing such details as her obesity and his toupee.

Whereas nineteenth-century American juries, as Halttunen demonstrates, were reluctant to convict women accused of mur- der, preferring "to contain the larger ideological danger posed by acknowledging that a respectable woman could be a killer, than to convict a flesh-and-blood woman of murder" (155), twentieth- century juries have shown far less compunction, especially to lower-class females. Instead of invoking "the cult of true woman- hood" to divert suspicion from women accused of murder, mod- ern writers of true crime have sought to uphold this cult by demonizing female killers like Beck as sexual deviants. In Knox's view, the Hearts Killers exemplify the American tale of murder by exposing the US not only as a vengeful society that seeks closure for murder in execution, but also as a "romance culture" that peddles unreal and impossible hopes to its citizens (139), especially to distraught women whose attempts to realize these mass-mediated illusions lead them to tragedy. Such was the case, Knox argues, not only for the Hearts Killers' victims, but also for Beck herself.

Knox's evident sympathy for Beck (whom she routinely calls by her first name) prompts her not only to retell Beck's story but to speak (up) for her-namely, by reconstructing the "love story" that she failed to communicate during a trial that con- tested incommensurable narratives: "Martha tells a love story, but the court and the reporters are convened to hear the tale of murder" (93). Notwithstanding Beck's evident mistreatment and misrepresentation by the media, it is somewhat disconcerting to find her being spoken for in place of the murderer's victims who are forever deprived a voice. But then the victim does not play much of a role in the tale of murder, which, in Knox's formula- tion, is primarily concerned with the murderer and with the or- deals that she/he faces of a trial and execution. Halttunen, in

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American Literary History 787

contrast, does not lose sight of the actual victims in her discus- sion of nineteenth-century "sexual tales of murder," and docu- ments the insidious strategies whereby the victims-especially those slain females suspected of sexual depravity-were blamed in absentia for their (typically male) assailants' violence: "The new gynecology of guilt demonized the female murder victim, shifting the guilt for her violent death from her killer to herself" (207). Thus prostitutes, those frequent targets of murderous male violence, were depicted in trials of accused assailants as "murder- ing Medusas," while the deaths of female victims of sex crimes like rape-murder and abortion-homicide were routinely attrib- uted to their "alien sexual physiology" and even to "the intrinsic violence of the female reproductive system" (193-94)!

Although Halttunen and Knox are both concerned with fe- male victims, the former exposes the grotesque logic whereby such victims were portrayed as murderers while the latter tends to engage in the "reflexive logic," as Seltzer calls it, of depicting "the victimizer as victim" (257). When the word cruel appears in Knox's study, it is more likely to refer to true-crime writers' treatment of the killer Beck (their "cruelly ironic tone" [123], "black comedy of the cruellest kind" [126]) rather than to Beck's treatment of her victims. Also, while six of Knox's chapters are concerned with "The Killers" (the title of part 1), only three deal with "The Killed" (part 2). And even these section titles are mis- leading, since killers like the "Atlanta child murderer" Wayne Williams and the caregiver Gertrude Baniewski continue to be the focus of part 2, in which it is again argued that these assail- ants were misrepresented by the media and victimized by the law.

What really distinguishes the two parts of Knox's study is not the distinction between killers and killed, but a concern in part 1 with true-crime narratives, like the media's distorted ac- counts of the Hearts Killers, and in part 2 with "counternarra- tive[s] of murder" (153), personal and passionate works that in- corporate an awareness and analysis of social issues like race and gender. Knox's chief examples of such counternarratives are James Baldwin's account in The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) of the Atlanta child murders, Kate Millett's The Base- ment (1979), which deals with Baniewski's 1965 torture-murder of a 16-year-old girl, and Lionel Dahmer's A Fathers Story (1994) about his notorious serial-killer son Jeffrey. In contrast to true-crime writers who assume one authorized-authoritative-

authoritarian role or another, Baldwin, Millett, and Dahmer practice, in Knox's eyes, "a 'fitting' way of writing about murder" that testifies rather than explains, and that witnesses rather than

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788 Murder. The State of the Art

judges (213). Although these writers' counternarratives avoid turning their respective subjects into monstrous figures of ro- mance-a kind of modern version of Frankenstein's creature-

they still focus on the killer's story rather than the victim's, and in this respect resemble Knox's own rewriting of Beck's tale. In the end such counternarratives tend to erase all differences be-

tween killer and killed: like his alleged victims, Baldwin's Wil- liams was "another black 'child,'" a "menaced boy" (155); Mil- lett's Likens is a "collaborating" victim who shares her killer's "heritage of feminine shame" (172, 169); and Knox's Beck and her victims have all tragically bought into their romance culture's idealized notion of being attractive and desirable. By contextu- alizing the killer's murderous violence in social institutions, such counternarratives risk displacing and diffusing that violence, even making the victim seem indistinguishable from her killer so that their stories appear one and the same. What Knox writes of Millett's own identification with both the female murderer and female victim in her work may well be true of all counternarra- tives, including Knox's own: "'[K]inship' . . . is the analytic flaw of this counternarrative of murder" (187).3

Despite Knox's apparent seduction by her murderous sub- ject Beck, her study succeeds admirably as "a critique of author- ity in the tale of murder" (78). She persuasively argues that "the promotion of the tale of murder to the canon of true crime" has been made possible by the misinformation and distortion com- monly practiced by medical and judicial authorities as well as by the news media (104). True crime turns out to be anything but true; it is less a genre than a metagenre, or a discourse that is ultimately "indistinguishable from the fictional genres of crime in the detective and mystery story" (45). Indeed, Knox reads the entire discourse of true crime in the same way that Halttunen reads the fictional subgenre of detective fiction: the author- analyst assumes the role of the "Heroic Detective," who always proves himself "equal to the task of reconstructing a full and authoritative narrative of the crime" (Halttunen 132). For Knox, even forensic psychology is true crime in a "scholarly guise" (51), a genre that "appear[s] to foreground the murderer as authorita- tive subject, while actually foregrounding the authority of the analyst" (204).

Like Knox, Seltzer is concerned with twentieth-century American violence, but in a guise that doesn't readily fit into the conventional narrative form of tales of murder. And like Halttu-

nen, Seltzer detects the violence inherent in "American gothic" culture, but in its contemporary guise which emphasizes "the

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American Literary History 789

'gothic' rapport between persons and spaces" (202-03).4 Instead of focusing on murder narratives in the manner of Knox and Halttunen, Seltzer is chiefly concerned with the killer's persona and with the places that are his haunts (typically multiroomed buildings, from cheap motels to Herman Webster Mudgett's "murder castle" in fin de siecle Chicago). Although multiple murders were certainly committed before 1900, Seltzer describes the serial murderer as "a new kind of person" who first appeared around this time (2). The focus of his study is the multiple mur- derer's twentieth-century incarnation or representation as the "stranger-" or "addictive-" killer (10, 273) whose practices of "stranger-intimacy" (6) and public violence are characteristic of the modern "machine culture" (33) already outlined in Seltzer's 1992 book Bodies and Machines, and now rediagnosed as "wound culture."5

We can better appreciate the serial killer as a new cultural phenomenon by contrasting Seltzer's account of twentieth- century America with Halttunen's historical account of the civ- ilizing process that began in the Enlightenment. Halttunen describes how the repression or "privatiz[ing]" of individuals' "mundane bodily practices" was offset by an explosion of gothic "body-horror" in the realm of representation (79). As the bound- aries between public and private, reality and representation, were more sharply delineated, violence was relegated to the side of the private/representation with the result that violent incursions into the public zone of actual life appeared transgressive and scandal- ous, and murderers were treated more as moral deviants than as common sinners. Against this pre-twentieth-century model of social normalcy and criminal deviancy, Seltzer describes a "pathological public sphere" marked by a total "breakdown in the distinction between the individual and the mass and between

private and public registers" (253). The new twentieth-century technologies-especially the new media technologies of type- writers, telephones, and television-have all but eliminated the intimate and private. With no place left to privatize bodily func- tions or repress forbidden desires, violence can no longer remain hidden, secret, and domestic, but is transformed along with ev- erything else into a public spectacle.6 In this wound culture where the individual can no longer be distinguished from the mass, Halt- tunen's categories of "common sinner" or "moral deviant" no longer make sense. If anything, the serial killer is a bizarre syn- thesis of these earlier conditions: a kind of common deviant who

is "abnormally normal: 'just like you or me"' (Seltzer 10). Unable to forge individual identities for themselves in a world of me-

With no place left to privatize bodily functions or repress forbidden desires, violence can no

longer remain hidden, secret, and domestic, but

is transformed along with everything else into a public spectacle.

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790 Murder: The State of the Art

chanical reproduction and simulation in which people are no longer perceived as living individuals but merely as lifelike cop- ies, serial killers melt into the crowd to become "statistical per- sons" (43) whose characteristic form of violence is "murder by numbers" (17).

As described by Seltzer, serial violence doesn't lend itself to the neat, artful, gothic, or romance narratives discerned by Halttunen or Knox, which plot the killer's development from traumatic beginnings (poverty, abandonment, abuse) to violent end (execution). Instead, stories of serial violence are inherently episodic and lack any definite beginning, middle, or end. Rather than present a causal sequence of events, such stories consist of "a series of promiscuous substitutions between bodies and repre- sentations ... ; between the serial consumption of visual spec- tacles and repetitive acts of violence ... ; between, most literally, ink and blood .. .; between, most excessively, the processing of information and the life process itself" (45-46). Such "promiscu- ous analogism" flourishes in the absence of narrative structures informed by cause, intention, and motive (46). It is precisely at those moments in such "melodramas of agency," as Seltzer calls them (204), when agency becomes "uncertain" or "endangered" (70)-when identity is reduced to a matter of identification, when the personal ego becomes the permeable "social ego" or "the subject in a state of shock" (109, 204), when "analogy" is converted into "cause" (70), and disorders of self-difference are registered as disorders of sexual difference-that violence inevi- tably erupts. At such moments, representations are indistinguish- able from reality, not only "com[ing] to life" but "taking life" in the process (114).

Seltzer goes even further than Knox in contextualizing the killer's murderous violence in social institutions. In fact, his study is less concerned with serial killers themselves than it is with

portraying them as a production (or symptom) of contempo- rary "wound culture" and as a construction (or projection) of academic-scientific discourse and the popular media-"serial killer fiction" like Emile Zola's La Bete humaine (1890) and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952). Some of Seltzer's most illuminating insights result from his reading of literary works that are not directly concerned with serial killers-works like Jack London's "addiction writings" and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) ("a story about the wound" [278]). But for the most part, Seltzer's study is less an analysis of the serial killer than it is a sophisticated critical survey of a wide range of psychological and sociological studies of murder and violence. Not only are the analytical and explanatory pretensions

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American Literary History 791

of scientific studies of murderous violence exposed (the FBI's elite Behavioral Science Unit comes in for particular criticism), but those studies themselves are also treated as constructions

generated by the same pathologies of machine-wound culture- crises of identity, agency, and sexuality-that produce the serial killer as that culture's most representative figure.7 So powerful and pervasive are those pathologies that Seltzer himself fre- quently succumbs to the very "tautological logic" he critiques- namely, the attempt to understand serial killers "as condensed symptoms of the social" and to construct "the subject as a reflex or cliche of his or her culture" (126). Thus in the same chapter in which he criticizes the "banality of claims about persons illus- trating conditions" (204), Seltzer dubs the serial murderer Mud- gett/Holmes as "something of a poster child for machine cul- ture" (218).

Serial Killers contains a number of fascinating insights into the nature of murderous violence in the age of mechanical repro- duction, such as the connection between the critical "realization of the constructedness of persons and the drive to automatistic violence" (129), the close relation between taking and faking life (killing animals and humans, and then skinning and preserving them in "life-like" form), and the "deadly logic" that links the seemingly heroic activities of witnessing and surviving to killing (272). Moreover, Seltzer complements the work of Halttunen and Knox in offering his own perspective on the distinctive char- acter of American violence-namely, by calling attention to the "uncanny relation between a progressive national history and the repetition of, or regression to, primitive acts and scenes" (238). Examples of such violent "techno-primitivism" range from the relatively recent Central Park wildings to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago-a celebration of violence that happened to be staged just a short distance from the Holmes Castle, where the man long known as "America's most prolific serial killer" imprisoned, asphyxiated, and incinerated possibly hundreds of victims (203). Yet despite such provocative examples and the abundant theoretical insights set forth in this study, a coherent portrait of the serial killer never quite emerges, although Seltzer might well argue that this elusive- ness is itself the serial killer's most typical characteristic. Indeed, all that can really be said about this figure is that she/he is the exemplary representative of the "pathological public sphere" in which everything is an effect without an identifiable cause (6), in which identity is mediated by technology, and in which the only intimacy is "stranger-intimacy" whose erotic manifestations pre- dictably tend toward violence. The serial killer is an archetypal

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792 Murder: The State of the Art

simulacrum of contemporary culture, a figure who is not so much similar to anyone or anything else but "'just similar'- something like a group of one or the embodiment of the crowd or mass within: the mass in person" (231).

Put a bit less elliptically, Seltzer's serial killer is the most flagrant instance of the crisis of selfhood in contemporary Amer- ican culture. In studying the serial killer-or rather in studying the ways we try to make sense of this apparently antisocial fig- ure-we confront the specter of an oversocialized being who can give us a greater awareness of ourselves and of our present cul- tural predicament. In his "abnormal normality," the serial killer stands to help us recognize (as Seltzer parenthetically observes) that normality is not a qualitative condition but, "like killing," is "a matter of numbers: the abnormal normality of statistical persons" (142).

Despite Seltzer's best efforts to get people to take a new look at the serial killer as a construction of our methodologies, a projection of our pathologies, and an effect of our technologies, such scrutiny is unlikely to make most members of "the generally murderous but nonmurdering public" more aware of their affin- ity with this violent figure (142). On the contrary, readers of this study who find themselves more puzzled than ever concerning who such figures are may be all the more inclined to disavow any such affinity while reaffirming their own notions of normality and self-identity. In the end it seems doubtful whether the serial killer can truly serve a heuristic purpose for the general "non- murdering public" as a being whose apparent difference from (but intrinsic sameness to) others will enable them to recognize the intrinsic "maladies of self-difference" inside themselves (7). It may well be that the serial killer's only contribution to the social order will be to continue to appear (however fallaciously) ethically "other"-and therefore, all the more aesthetically com- pelling and alluring. Indeed, the murderer in general can be ex- pected to remain a gothic, deviant figure despite the best- intentioned efforts of our most astute cultural commentators to

insist (however ineffectually) that the murderer is not only one of us, but all of us.

Notes

1. Occasionally Knox refers to the "tale of murder proper" (129), apart from the "execution sequence" (120), and in her final chapter she distinguishes be- tween the "original tale of murder (the crime for which the murderer was sen-

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American Literary History 793

tenced) ... and a second, entirely new tale of murder [that] arises from the execution" (189).

2. While Knox seems unable to decide "[w]hether the execution is a distinctive subgenre to the tale of murder or an exemplary murder narrative" in its own right (197), Halttunen suggests that from the beginning, execution was not only the exemplary, but the original murder narrative in America from which all later forms evolved. Moreover, she specifies a key difference between public executions in early modem Europe and in seventeenth-century New England. Both were theatrical spectacles, but while European executions, as theorized by Michel Foucault, were "spectacles of suffering" that inscribed the ruler's power on the body of the condemned individual, American executions were intended for "the moral and religious edification of the community, not the display of political power" (23). Seltzer adapts Foucault's analysis to contem- porary American media culture, noting that "the fascination with spectacles of bodily violence clearly does not go away" as Foucault seems to suggest, but "mutates from its 'pre-modern' form," becoming "not merely spectacles of sex and violence in public but a sexual violence inseparable from its reproduction and mechanical reduplication" (129).

3. There is another obvious difference between the counterarratives of mur-

der discussed in part 2 and the true-crime narratives treated in part 1 that Knox fails to mention: unlike their counterparts in part 1, the killers in part 2- Williams, Baniewski, and Dahmer (who was slain in prison)-were not sen- tenced to be executed. This banal fact may go a long way to explaining the difference between true-crime narratives and countemarratives, and may be the real reason why Baldwin's, Millett's, and Lionel Dahmer's accounts are more complex and open-ended than the true-crime narratives discussed in the first part of Knox's study. After all, there is bound to be less melodramatic emphasis on the murderer-as-victim in narratives in which this figure is not shown awaiting and ultimately meeting his or her fate.

4. In its "identification with outmoded spaces," writes Seltzer, the modem "subject itself appears as a sort of gothic revival" (235).

5. Indeed, one of Seltzer's recurring arguments is that it's increasingly difficult to differentiate actual killers from their constructions ("The uncertain bound- aries between the subject and its construction make(s) visible the uncertain for- mation of the subject from the inside out and from the outside in" [246]), and that this uncertainty is itself a key factor in, if not a cause of, serial violence.

6. The recognition and exposure of formerly secret forms of domestic vio- lence might seem a positive development, but such publicity can also provoke and incite violence through copycatting and through the serial killer's "conta- gious identification with others: a mimetic opening to others through the open- ing of others" (Seltzer 276).

7. Seltzer maintains that the BSU's profiles of serial killers are largely based on the killers' own mediated self-representations. He even suggests that investi- gative efforts have been generally unsuccessful because "both the malady of the collective killer and the method of the 'mindhunter"' entail similar "disorders

of identification" (184).

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  • Contents
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  • Issue Table of Contents
    • American Literary History, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter, 2000
      • Front Matter
      • Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic [pp. 659 - 684]
      • Misgivings: Melville, Race, and the Ambiguities of Benevolence [pp. 685 - 712]
      • From Decadent Aesthetics to Political Fetishism: The "Oracle Effect" of Robert Frost's Poetry [pp. 713 - 744]
      • America's Origin Myth: Remembering Plymouth Rock [pp. 745 - 756]
      • Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Witch? Queer Studies in American Literature [pp. 757 - 770]
      • Sex and the Single Decade [pp. 771 - 779]
      • Murder: The State of the Art [pp. 780 - 793]
      • Intellectuals and Democracy: Academics in Paradise/Emerson's Vocation [pp. 794 - 801]
      • The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism [pp. 802 - 818]
      • Back Matter [pp. 819 - 819]